Is there any way to discover what charset encoding a file is using?

[James]

Hi all,

Is there any way, to discover what charset eoncoding a file is
actually by reading the content of it.

For example, I may have a file which contains some Japanese Character,
how could I determine if those character are actually Japanese ones.

Thank You.

James

 

[Roedy Green]

Is there any way, to discover what charset eoncoding a file is
actually by reading the content of it.

For example, I may have a file which contains some Japanese Character,
how could I determine if those character are actually Japanese ones.

see http://mindprod.com/projects/encodingidentification.html

 

[Michael Borgwardt]

Is there any way, to discover what charset eoncoding a file is
actually by reading the content of it.

Not with anything remotely approaching certainty.

For example, I may have a file which contains some Japanese Character,
how could I determine if those character are actually Japanese ones.

Your best bet would be to take some common japanese words, encode them
in each of the three(!) charsets commonly used in Japan plus UTF-8
and UTF-16 and look for matches.

If you just have a file that might be any language in any encoding,
you're pretty much f*cked. In the worst case, it might be a *mix*
of languages encoded in ISO-2022 (which, if I understood it correctly,
is stateful and uses special command sequences to switch between modes
in which different languages can be encoded).