I created file with UTF-8 encoded content (using PHP fputcsv).
When I open this file in Notepad++ - characters are wrong (Notepad++ starts with ANSI encoding).
When I set Format->"Encode in UTF-8" from menu - everything is fine.
Im worrying, that Notepad++ can recognize encoding somehow, and maybe something is wrong with my file created with fputcsv? First byte or something?
Automatically detecting an encoding is not something that can be done accurately. It's pretty much essential that the encoding be specified explicitly. It can be guessed in some cases, but even then not with 100% certainty.
This documentation (Encoding) explains the situation in relation to Notepad++.
They also point out that the difficulty arises especially if the file has not been saved with a Byte Order Mark (BOM).
Given that your file displays correctly once you manually set the encoding, I would say there's nothing wrong with how you are generating and saving the file. The only thing you can check for is whether a BOM is being saved, which might improve the chances of Notepad++ being able to automatically detect the encoding.
It's worth noting that although it may help editors like Notepad++ identify the encoding more accurately, according to The Unicode Standard document, the BOM is not recommended.
You have to check the lower right corner of the Notepad++ GUI to see the actual enconding that is being used. The problem it's not that Notepad++ specific because guessing the right encoding is a big problem without any real solution so it's better to let the user decide what is the most appropriate encoding in each single case.
When you want to reflect the encoding of the text file in a Java program, you have to consider two thnigs: encoding and character set. When you open a text file, you see encoding under "Encoding" menu. Additionally look at the character set menu point. Under "Eastern European" you will find "ISO 8859-2", and under Central European "Windows-1250". You can set corresponding encoding in the Java program
when you look up in the table:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/intl/encoding.doc.html
For example, for Cenntral European character set "Windows-1250" the table suggest Java encoding "Cp1250". Set the encoding and you will see the characters in program properly.
Related
I'm looking at a xliff file and found some weird boxes which I don't know what they are? (Please see screenshot)
Do you guys have any ideas what the weird bug boxes are?
Thank you very much and I'm looking forward to your reply!
I have never seen that character, but here is how I would go about finding out what it is:
The first thing to do is to check the source and target language of the XLIFF file, which should be defined in the XLIFF header. Perhaps this character is a valid character in either the source or the target language script.
The next step depends on whether you can contact the person who created the XLIFF file. If yes, you can show them what the file looks like for you and ask them if the file has perhaps been garbled during transmission.
If not, you could check the encoding of the XLIFF file. If it is UTF-16, just open the file in a hex editor, find the code point for this character, and look it up on unicode.org. If the file is encoded as UTF-8 open it in Notepad++ (or any other text editor that allows you to change the encoding), convert it to UTF-16, then proceed as described above.
If you don't know the encoding of the file it becomes a matter of guessing. You can look at some other <trans-units> (assuming that there are more than this one in your XLIFF file): if they contain other extended characters and they are displayed correctly your editor has probably guessed the right encoding, and you can convert to Unicode and look up the character code. Different text editors have different ways of guessing encodings: try a few.
It's possible that those characters are the result of an encoding conversion error, which are commonly called mojibake.
It's also possible this is some sort of emoji or unusual glyph that's not rendering correctly in your editor. This would be unusual, but given that it appears to be a UI string, it might be possible.
I am writing some data as a xml file with ISO-8859 encoding.If I tried to open the file in notepad++.I can able to see the 'Â' character which is already present in the file.But if I tried to open the file in notepad the character 'Â' gets removed.Though I am very new to Encoding,I don't know why.Please suggest some reason for this.
This file is also get opened in browser with the 'Â' character.
Thanks in Advance
Windows notepad is a very basic editor, and has quite a number of limitations, one of which is the support it has for different encoding formats other than ANSI, Unicode and UTF-8. When editing files in other formats, it can give unreliable/unexpected results.
If you are handling files in different encoding formats, you are better off avoiding notepad altogether and using an editor (such as Notepad++) which has better support for multiple encoding formats.
For more information on how Windows notepad "guesses" at the correct format to use (with varying levels of success) see here
Bear in mind that other editors often use similar techniques to "guess" the format of a file, so it is often a good idea to check/set the encoding for a file manually (where possible) for less common encoding formats to ensure you get the correct results every time.
I have a .csv list of businesses. The file has some strange characters in. For example, in this field: Stocktonon-Tees, the first hyphen, between Stockton and on seems to be a character with the value 6 rather than a hyphen, with the value 45. Stack overflow will probably sanatize this so you can't see it, so here is a pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/NuyyaQy9
Can anyone explain why this could be? Is it some encoding issue that I have missed? Or a corruption in the dataset?
Yes, it's almost certainly an encoding issue. A file just consists of binary data - it's how you interpret that binary data that matters. It sounds like Notepad is guessing at the originally-intended encoding, but whatever else you're using isn't.
Unfortunately you haven't said anything about what software is trying to read the file or what wrote it in the first place - but you should look at what encoding Notepad thinks it is, and work from there.
If it's your code that wrote the file out, and you get to decide the encoding, I'd recommend UTF-8 as a good general purpose, platform-portable encoding.
I remember when I used to develop website in Japan - where there are three different character encodings in currency - the developers had a trick to "force" the encoding of a source file so it would always open in their IDEs in the correct encoding.
What they did was to put a comment at the top of the file containing a Japanese character that only existed in that particular character encoding - it wasn't in any of the others! This worked perfectly.
I remember this because now I have a similar, albeit Anglophone, problem.
I've got some files that MUST be ISO-8859-1 but keep opening in my editor (Bluefish 1.0.7 on Linux) as UTF-8. This isn't normally a problem EXCEPT for pound (£) symbols and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I can fix the file and save it out again as ISO-8859-1, but I want it to always open as ISO-8859-1 in my editor.
So, are there any sort of character hacks - like I mention above - to do this? Or any other methods?
PS. Unicode advocates / evangelists needn't waste their time trying to convert me because I'm already one of them! This is a rickety older system I've inherited :-(
PPS. Please don't say "use a different editor" because I'm an old fart and set in my ways :-)
Normally, if you have a £ encoded as ISO-8859-1 (ie. a single byte 0xA3), that's not going to form part of a valid UTF-8 byte sequence, unless you're unlucky and it comes right after another top-bit-set character in such a way to make them work together as a UTF-8 sequence. (You could guard against that by putting a £ on its own at the top of the file.)
So no editor should open any such file as UTF-8; if it did, it'd lose the £ completely. If your editor does that, “use a different editor”—seriously! If your problem is that your editor is loading files that don't contain £ or any other non-ASCII character as UTF-8, causing any new £ you add to them to be saved as UTF-8 afterwards, then again, simply adding a £ character on its own to the top of the file should certainly stop that.
What you can't necessarily do is make the editor load it as ISO-8859-1 as opposed to any other character set where all single top-bit-set bytes are valid. It's only multibyte encodings like UTF-8 and Shift-JIS which you can exclude them by using byte sequences that are invalid for that encoding.
What will usually happen on Windows is that the editor will load the file using the system default code page, typically 1252 on a Western machine. (Not actually quite the same as ISO-8859-1, but close.)
Some editors have a feature where you can give them a hint what encoding to use with a comment in the first line, eg. for vim:
# vim: set fileencoding=iso-8859-1 :
The syntax will vary from editor to editor/configuration. But it's usually pretty ugly. Other controls may exist to change default encodings on a directory basis, but since we don't know what you're using...
In the long run, files stored as ISO-8859-1 or any other encoding that isn't UTF-8 need to go away and die, of course. :-)
You can put character ÿ (0xFF) in the file. It's invalid in UTF8. BBEdit on Mac correctly identifies it as ISO-8859-1. Not sure how your editor of choice will do.
Is there a setting in UltraEdit that allows me to see the encoding of the file?
In UltraEdit, the encoding that is being used to -display- the file, is shown in the status bar at the right somewhere, together with the line-ending type in use, for example, "U8-UNIX". You can also manually set as what encoding the file has to be displayed. In version 10 this is under menu View -> Set Code Page. You can also -convert- the actual codepage of the file under menu File -> Conversions.
If the file does not have a BOM header, a couple of bytes at the start of the file indicating the encoding, the -actual- encoding of the file, can only be guessed. And even if the file has a BOM header, there can still be encoding issues.
All text editors do this, and some are better at it than others. I haven't done a comparision to see which is best at it. At the moment (2012), I know UltraEdit fails to detect UTF-8 and other variants in 1000 line (or longer) text files if the first UTF-8 character only appears later in the document. It also fails to show the encoding properly when you set it manually.
Notepad++ is also not great at detecting it, but when you know the encoding, you can set it manually.
Sublime Text is, as far as I know, best at detecting the encoding, also in large files.
I think there are also some very good command line tools out there, ported from GNU to Windows, to detect encoding. My bet would be that that's going to be the best option.