Convert File Encoding
Change the encoding of a file, for example from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 or from UTF-8 to UTF-16. Also auto-detects the encoding from the BOM.
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Character Encodings Explained
What is a character encoding?
A character encoding is the rule that says which number represents which character. The same bytes can mean completely different things depending on the encoding.
Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32
| Encoding | Bytes per char | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| UTF-8 | 1 to 4 | ASCII-compatible, the encoding of the web (98%+) |
| UTF-16 | 2 or 4 | Used by Windows, Java, JavaScript internally |
| UTF-32 | 4 | Fixed-size, rarely used for files |
Legacy code pages
Before Unicode, each language had its own 8-bit encoding: ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe), windows-1251 (Cyrillic), Shift_JIS (Japanese), GBK (Chinese)...
The byte order mark (BOM)
The BOM signals byte order in UTF-16/32. In UTF-8 it is optional and can break Unix tools.
Common encodings
| Encoding | Typical use |
|---|---|
| UTF-8 | Everything modern |
| windows-1252 | Windows Western European |
| Shift_JIS | Japanese |
| GBK / GB18030 | Simplified Chinese |
| EUC-KR | Korean |