Windows utility detect file encoding

I've transformed the function forceUTF8 into a family of static functions on a class called Encoding. The new function is Encoding::toUTF8. You first have to detect what encoding has been used. If it is not present, read the encoding from the encoding attribute of the XML processing instruction. That allows you to set specific header fields and fetch the response header as well.

After fetching the response, you have to parse the HTTP response and split it into header and body. In some encodings, certain byte-sequences are invalid, an therefore it can distinguish between various candidates. Unfortunately, there are a lot of encodings, where the same bytes are valid but different.

In these cases, there is no way to determine the encoding; You can implement your own logic to make guesses in these cases. For example, data coming from a Japanese site might be more likely to have a Japanese encoding. As long as you only deal with Western European languages, the three major encodings to consider are utf-8 , iso and cp Since these are defaults for many platforms, they are also the most likely to be reported wrongly about. Therefore, a good strategy is to trust the provider, unless the encoding is reported as one of those three.

Once you've detected the encoding you need to convert it to your internal representation UTF-8 is the only sane choice. A really nice way to implement an isUTF8 -function can be found on php. This function detecting multibyte characters in a string might also prove helpful source :.

It may help you. That is presuming that in the "middle" conversion you used ISO If you used Windows, then convert into Windows latin1. The original source encoding is not important; the one you used in flawed, second conversion is. This is my guess at what happened; there's very little else you could have done to get four bytes in place of one extended ASCII byte. So you might want to use a specific order when specifying expected encodings. Still, keep in mind that this is not foolproof.

Working out the character encoding of RSS feeds seems to be complicated. Even normal web pages often omit, or lie about, their encoding. So you could try to use the correct way to detect the encoding and then fall back to some form of auto-detection guessing. I know this is an older question, but I figure a useful answer never hurts. Here is my solution. It works well in a header. PHP will throw warnings if it can't detect the source encoding automatically, so these warnings are suppressed with 's.

You need to test the character set on input since responses can come coded with different encodings. I force all content been sent into UTF-8 by doing detection and translation using the following function:. I was checking for solutions to encoding since ages , and this page is probably the conclusion of years of search!

I tested some of the suggestions you mentioned and here's my notes:. So I need to convert them into some "sane" UTF So I tried to use the function forceUTF8 posted on number 8, but in the database the string saved looks like this:.

So collecting some more information on this page and merging them with other information on other pages I solved my problem with this solution:. You need to be connected to the database, because this function wants a resource ID as a parameter.

After sorting out your php scripts, don't forget to tell mysql what charset you are passing and would like to recceive. I see this every other day in oscommerce shops. Back and fourth it might seem right. But phpmyadmin will show the truth. By telling mysql what charset you are passing it will handle the conversion of mysql data for you. When you try to handle multi languages like Japanese and Korean you might get in trouble.

I concluded that as long as input strings comes from HTML, it should use 'charset' in a meta element. The below snippet extracts title element from a web page. Why do you use the -b argument? I was curious about the -b argument too. The man page says it means "brief" Do not prepend filenames to output lines — craq. There's no need to parse file output, file -b --mime-encoding outputs just the charset encoding — jesjimher. Add a comment. I'm not delighted about yet more packages, yet sudo apt-get install uchardet is so easy that I decided not to worry about it As I just said in a comment above: uchardet falsely tells me the encoding of a file was "windows", although I explicitly saved that file as UTF However, encguess guess correctly, and it was pre-installed in Ubuntu Excellent, works perfectly.

Mohiuddin Ahmed. For your question, you need to use mv instead of iconv :! Wolfgang Fahl Wolfgang Fahl As pointed out on MacOS this won't work: file -b --mime-encoding Usage: file [-bchikLNnprsvz0] [-e test] [-f namefile] [-F separator] [-m magicfiles] [-M magicfiles] file Encoding is one of the hardest things to do, because you never know if nothing is telling you.

Norbert Hartl Norbert Hartl 9, 5 5 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 46 46 bronze badges. It may help to try to brute force. Then one would need to manually check the output searching for a clue into the right encoding. Of course, you can change the filtered formats replacing ISO or WIN for something appropriate or remove the filter by removing the grep command. In PHP you can check it like below: Specifying the encoding list explicitly: php -r "echo 'probably : '.

Mohamed23gharbi Mohamed23gharbi 1, 22 22 silver badges 27 27 bronze badges. I'm not talking about literal translation such as: English French of de, du and et the le, la, les although that's possible. If you really, really care about the encoding you need to validate it yourself. Matyas Matyas You can extract encoding of a single file with the file command.

I have a sample. Daniel Faure Daniel Faure 4 4 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. I made this script to convert all to utf! May i know is there any possible solutions to detect the encoding or character set charset of a file automatically?

Second, how to convert a particular encoding to Unicode once the file encoding is detected? Thanks in advance. As far as converting once you know the encoding, see the InputStreamReader and Charset classes for reading the file's bytes using a specific encoding.

Then you can use OutputStreamWriter to generate a new file using whatever encoding you want, including any of the Unicode formats you might want. I suspect Pete is simplifying for clarity, but it is worth remembering that Unicode is not an encoding.

Files written on Unix systems typically do not include a BOM as it would interfere with other important file-type marks. The short answer: there's no easy way to detect charset automatically. The long answer: Typically, no filesystem stores metadata that one can associate with a file encoding. Pragmatically differentiating between these single-byte encodings forces you to resort to either heuristics or getting help from the user if you notice, all major browsers allow you to select a web page's encoding for this very reason.

One can sometimes rule out these encodings, if invalid sequences are produced. Context is also helpful. It's unthinkable to choose the wrong encoding if another encoding would avoid strange chars.. But still there are errors.. Also it's a very confusing message to use ascii instead of UTF8 to save space.. Show 6 more comments. Marco Marco 2 2 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. OK, then, does the Windows OS store that information meta data actually somewhere? In the registry probably?

You're wrong. That is codepages- not quite the same. There are algorithms to guess at the Unicode encoding. Marcel: No. From the tools I tried, this one was the only that gave precise results, tried Cyrillic and non-standard Japanese.

It uses chardet under the hood. Wish I could post it as an answer ;c — Klesun. Add a comment. The Overflow Blog.