How do I convert an ANSI encoded file to UTF-8 with Notepad

Question

I have a website  and I can send my Turkish characters with jQuery in Firefox  but Internet Explorer doesn t send my Turkish characters  I looked at my source file in notepad  and this file s code page is ANSI    When I convert it to UTF-8 without BOM and close the file  the file is again ANSI when I reopen   How can I convert my file from ANSI to UTF-8

User · Answer

If you don t have non-ASCII characters  codepoints 128 and above  in your file  UTF-8 without BOM is the same as ASCII  byte for byte - so Notepad   will guess wrong   What you need to do is to specify the character encoding when serving the AJAX response - e g  with PHP  you d do this   header  Content-Type  application json  charset utf-8      The important part is to specify the charset with every JS response - else IE will fall back to user s system default encoding  which is wrong most of the time

User · Answer

Regarding this part      When I convert it to UTF-8 without bom and close file  the file is again ANSI when I reopen    The easiest solution is to avoid the problem entirely by properly configuring Notepad     Try Settings -  Preferences -  New document -  Encoding -  choose UTF-8 without BOM  and check Apply to opened ANSI files     That way all the opened ANSI files will be treated as UTF-8 without BOM   For explanation what s going on  read the comments below this answer   To fully learn about Unicode and UTF-8  read this excellent article from Joel Spolsky

User · Answer

Maybe this is not the answer you needed  but I encountered similar problem  so I decided to put it here   I needed to convert 500 xml files to UTF8 via Notepad    Why Notepad    When I used the option  Encode in UTF8   many other converters use the same logic  it messed up all special characters  so I had to use  Convert to UTF8  explicitly     Here some simple steps to convert multiple files via Notepad   without messing up with special characters  for ex  diacritical marks     Run Notepad   and then open menu Plugins- Plugin Manager- Show Plugin Manager Install Python Script  When plugin is installed  restart the application  Choose menu Plugins- Python Script- New script  Choose its name  and then past the following code    convertToUTF8 py  import os import sys from Npp import notepad   import it first   filePathSrc  C   Users      Path to the folder with files to convert for root  dirs  files in os walk filePathSrc       for fn in files           if fn -4        xml     Specify type of the files             notepad open root          fn                    notepad runMenuCommand  Encoding    Convert to UTF-8                 notepad save                 if you try to save replace the file  an annoying confirmation window would popup              notepad saveAs        format fn  -4     utf8 xml                 notepad close     After all  run the script

[utf-8] How do I convert an ANSI encoded file to UTF-8 with Notepad++?

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