9
2
I am using Windows XP. I am looking for a tool that for given directory will find all files having particular character encoding (like UTF-8). Do you know such a tool?
9
2
I am using Windows XP. I am looking for a tool that for given directory will find all files having particular character encoding (like UTF-8). Do you know such a tool?
6
This tool works great. Check it out. It shows all files and their encodings for a folder.
http://encodingchecker.codeplex.com/releases/view/59420
There is also this, for bulk changing files to UTF8.
3
In general this is not possible - apart from the special case of UTF-8 text files with a Byte Order Mark. Since the name of the encoding is not stored in the text file the only way to tell, for example, CP437 from CP850 would be to make a guess based on a statistical analysis of the whole file, looking at frequency of certain character pairs etc.
Solaris users have auto_ef but, so far as I know, there isn't a Windows port.
Perl users have Encode::Guess
According to Wikipedia "The newer versions of the unix File command attempt to do a basic detection of character encoding. (also available on cygwin and mac)"
None of the above will be 100% reliable. If your files are definitely all in one of a handful of known encodings you may be able to do better.
1
Under Windows this is possible by searching for the right Byte Order Mark (BOM), on the condition that the files were created with a BOM.
You would need a search program for that.
One possibility may be Grep for Windows and search using the beginning of file operator (^^).
3There's no completely reliable way to detect any file's encoding in the first place. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams – 2010-11-09T15:01:49.217