The encoding of text in digital document files refers to the way in which sequences of bytes are mapped to characters in a language. There are many different encodings for different languages. You can determine the encoding of a text file using a number of software tools.
It is necessary
- - Microsoft Office Word;
- - KWrite;
- - Mozilla Firefox;
- - enca.
Instructions
Step 1
Use Microsoft Office Word, if installed on your computer, to determine the encoding of the text file. Run this application. In the main menu, select the "File" and "Open …" items, or press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + O. In the dialog that appears, navigate to the desired directory and select the file. Click the "Open" button. If the text encoding is different from CP1251, the "Convert File" dialog will automatically open. Activate the "Other" option in it and select the encoding using the list on the right. If the correct encoding is selected, readable text will be displayed in the "Sample" field.
Step 2
Apply text editors that allow selection of the source text encoding. A good example of such an application is KWrite (runs on KDE on UNIX-like systems). Load the text file into an editor. Then just iterate over the encodings until readable text is displayed (in KWrite, this is done using the Encoding section of the Tools menu).
Step 3
Similar to a text editor, you can use a browser to determine the file encoding. Use Mozilla Firefox. Run this application. If not installed, download the appropriate distribution from mozilla.org and install it. Open a text file in your browser. To do this, select the "File" and "Open file …" items in the main menu, or press Ctrl + O. If the loaded text is displayed correctly, expand the "Encoding" section of the "View" menu and find out the encoding from the name of the item on which the mark is set. Otherwise, select this parameter by selecting various items of the same menu, as well as its section "Additional".
Step 4
Apply specialized utilities to determine the encoding of text files. On UNIX-like systems, you can use enca. If necessary, install this program using the available package managers. List the available languages by running the command:
enca --list languages
Determine the encoding of the text file by specifying its name with the -g option and the document language with the -L option. For example:
enca -L russian -g /home/vic/tmp/aaa.txt.
