Determine File Encoding

I ran into a problem where I wasn’t sure if I could trust the encoding that my text editor was displaying. I also wanted to check the encoding on about 10,000 files and determine if it was not a specific encoding. So, I created a little program to tell me the encoding of a file. This in combination with powershell allowed me to loop recursively through all the files in a directory and create a list of the files that were not the correct encoding.

A Good portion of the code that I used for this application was available on the another site that describes how to determine the Encoding of a Unicode file.

The application can be downloaded below:

DOWNLOAD: Determine File Encoding

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “Determine File Encoding”

sampe Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Hello,

What exactly this exe should do? I’m looking for exactly the same kind of program, but I didn’t notice anything, when I ran your program.

I’d appreciate, if you could give me more advice…
Brett Says:
February 19th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
It is a command line program. To run it you open up dos by going to start→run and type cmd.

Then you run the program by giving it a file to process.

c:\path\to\FileType.exe c:\path\to\myfile.txt
David Says:
May 15th, 2009 at 4:49 am
Hi.

Been looking for something like this but was wondering. No matter what the encoding is it only seems to return:

C:\Temp\Perl>FileType.exe expected_chinese.txt
1252: Western European (Windows)

I was expecting UTF-8.

David.