[visual-studio] How to set standard encoding in Visual Studio

I am searching for a way to setup Visual Studio so it always saves my files in UTF-8.

I have only found options to set this project wide. Is there a way to set it Visual Studio wide?

The Problem is Windows and Microsoft applications put byte order marks at the beginning of all your files so other applications often break or don't read these UTF-8 encoding marks. I perfect example of this problem was triggering quirsksmode in old IE web browsers when encoding in UTF-8 as browsers often display web pages based on what encoding falls at the start of the page. It makes a mess when other applications view those UTF-8 Visual Studio pages.

I usually do not recommend Visual Studio Extensions, but I do this one to fix that issue:

Fix File Encoding: https://vlasovstudio.com/fix-file-encoding/

The FixFileEncoding above install REMOVES the byte order mark and forces VS to save ALL FILES without signature in UTF-8. After installing go to Tools > Option then choose "FixFileEncoding". It should allow you to set all saves as UTF-8 . Add "cshtml to the list of files to always save in UTF-8 without the byte order mark as so: ".(htm|html|cshtml)$)".

Now open one of your files in Visual Studio. To verify its saving as UTF-8 go to File > Save As, then under the Save button choose "Save With Encoding". It should choose "UNICODE (Save without Signature)" by default from the list of encodings. Now when you save that page it should always save as UTF-8 without byte order mark at the beginning of the file when saving in Visual Studio.

What

It is possible with EditorConfig.

EditorConfig helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs.

This also includes file encoding.

EditorConfig is built-in Visual Studio 2017 by default, and I there were plugins available for versions as old as VS2012. Read more from EditorConfig Visual Studio Plugin page.

How

You can set up a EditorConfig configuration file high enough in your folder structure to span all your intended repos (up to your drive root should your files be really scattered everywhere) and configure the setting charset:

charset: set to latin1, utf-8, utf-8-bom, utf-16be or utf-16le to control the character set.

You can add filters and exceptions etc on every folder level or by file name/type should you wish for finer control.

Once configured then compatible IDEs should automatically do it's thing to make matching files comform to set rules. Note that Visual Studio does not automatically convert all your files but do its bit when you work with files in IDE (open and save).

What next

While you could have a Visual-studio-wide setup, I strongly suggest to still include an EditorConfig root to your solution version control, so that explicit settings are automatically synced to all team members as well. Your drive root editorconfig file can be the fallback should some project not have their own editorconfig files set up yet.

I don't know of a global setting nither but you can try this:

1. Save all Visual Studio templates in UTF-8
2. Write a Visual Studio Macro/Addin that will listen to the DocumentSaved event and will save the file in UTF-8 format (if not already).
3. Put a proxy on your source control that will make sure that new files are always UTF-8.

Do you want the files to save as UTF-8 because you are using special characters that would be lost in ASCII encoding? If that's the case, then there is a VS2008 global setting in Tools > Options > Environment > Documents, named Save documents as Unicode when data cannot be saved in codepage. When this is enabled, VS2008 will save as Unicode if certain characters cannot be represented in the otherwise-default codepage.

Also, which files are not being saved as UTF-8? All of my .cs, .csproj, .sln, .config, .as*x, etc, all save as UTF-8 (with signature, the byte order marks), by default.

I work with Windows7.

Control Panel - Region and Language - Administrative - Language for non-Unicode programs.

After I set "Change system locale" to English(United States). My default encoding of vs2010 change to Windows-1252. It was gb2312 before.

I created a new .cpp file for a C++ project, after checking in the new file to TFS the encoding show Windows-1252 from the properties page of the file.