How to determine encoding table of a text file
You can't reliably detect the encoding from a textfile - what you can do is make an educated guess by searching for a non-ascii char and trying to determine if it is a unicode combination that makes sens in the languages you are parsing.
See this question and the selected answer. Thereâs no sure-fire way of doing it. At most, you can rule things out. The UTF encodings youâre unlikely to get false positives on, but the 8-bit encodings are tough, especially if you donât know the starting language. No tool out there currently handles all the common 8-bit encodings from Macs, Windows, Unix, but the selected answer provides an algorithmic approach that should work adequately for a certain subset of encodings.
If you're on Linux, try file -i filename.txt
.
$ file -i vol34.tex
vol34.tex: text/x-tex; charset=us-ascii
For reference, here is my environment:
$ which file
/usr/bin/file
$ file --version
file-5.09
magic file from /etc/magic:/usr/share/misc/magic
Some file
versions (e.g. file-5.04 on OS X/macOS) have slightly different command-line switches:
$ file -I vol34.tex
vol34.tex: text/x-tex; charset=us-ascii
$ file --mime vol34.tex
vol34.tex: text/x-tex; charset=us-ascii
Also, have a look here.
Open the file with Notepad++ and will see on the right down corner the encoding table name. And in the menu encoding you can change the encoding table and save the file.