How to check if a txt file is in ASCII or UTF-8 format in Windows environment

Question

I have converted a  txt file from ASCII to UTF-8 using UltraEdit  However  I am not sure how to verify if it is in UTF-8 format in Windows environment     Thank you

User · Answer

Open it in a hex editor and make sure that the first three bytes are a UTF8 BOM  EF BB BF

User · Answer

I had a directory of files that I wanted to check   I created an Excel macro to determine ANSI vs  UTF-8   This worked for me           Sub GetTextFileEncoding           Dim sFile As String         Dim sPath As String         Dim sTextLine As String         Dim iRow As Integer           Set Defaults and Initial Values         iRow   1         sPath    C textfiles           sFile   Dir sPath  amp     txt            Do While Len sFile   gt  0              Get FileType              Debug Print sFile  amp    -    amp  FileEncodeType sPath  amp  sFile                Show on Excel Worksheet             Cells iRow  1  Value   sFile             Cells iRow  2  Value   FileEncodeType sPath  amp  sFile                Get next file             sFile   Dir               Increment Row             iRow   iRow   1         Loop     End Sub      Function FileEncodeType sFile As String  As String         Dim bEF As Boolean         Dim bBB As Boolean         Dim bBF As Boolean          bEF   False         bBB   False         bBF   False          Open sFile For Input As  1             If Not EOF 1  Then                  Read first line                 Line Input  1  textline                  Debug Print textline                 For i   1 To 3                      Debug Print Asc Mid textline  i  1    amp    -    amp  Mid textline  i  1                      Select Case i                         Case 1                             If Asc Mid textline  i  1     239 Then                                 bEF   True                             End If                         Case 2                              If Asc Mid textline  i  1     187 Then                                 bBB   True                             End If                         Case 3                              If Asc Mid textline  i  1     191 Then                                 bBF   True                             End If                         Case 4                      End Select                 Next             End If         Close  1          If bEF And bBB And bBF Then             FileEncodeType    UTF-8          Else             FileEncodeType    ANSI          End If     End Function

User · Answer

Open the file using Notepad   and check the  Encoding  menu  you can check the current Encoding and or Convert to a set of encodings available

User · Answer

Text files in Windows don t have a format  There s an unofficial convention that if the file starts with the BOM codepoint in UTF-8 format that it s UTF-8  but that convention isn t universally supported  That would be the 3 byte sequence   xef xbf xbe   i e         in the Latin-1 character set

User · Answer

If you use Windows 10 and has Windows Subsystem for Linux  WSL   it can be easily done by typing  file   from the shell   For example     file code cpp  code cpp  C source  UTF-8 Unicode  with BOM  text  with CRLF line terminators

User · Answer

Open the file in Notepad  Click  Save As      In the  Encoding   combo box you will see the current file format

[.net] How to check if a .txt file is in ASCII or UTF-8 format in Windows environment?

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