Home / server / Questions / 630549
Accepted
tvl
Asked: 2014-09-24 04:04:09 +0800 CST

Linux `file` command display encoding

  • 772

The file command returns me the encoding of a file + the EOL if it's not LF.

But it returns ASCII for both ANSI and UTF-8 without BOM. On UTF-8 files it returns UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM).

An I doing something wrong, or it's the default behavior? At if it's the default behavior how I can see if it's ANSI or UTF-8 without BOM?

linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    file tries to give you as specific information as possible (the opposite case would be to always print binary file, which is technically correct but not very useful). ANSI is not a specific encoding, and UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, so it will report ASCII for both if the bytes contained in the file all are inside the ASCII charset.

    • 1

  2. You cannot determine if a file is encoded in ASCII (8-bit) or ANSI or UTF-8 (without BOM). This is only a guess of file.

    When a file has a BOM then file will guess that it is UTF encoded (either UTF-8 or UTF-16 or UTF-32). But without this you see only a binary stream of data which could be a text file encoded in some encoding.

    I bet that file will also fail on determining the difference between ASCII and ISO-8859-1 because the first 128 bytes are the same in both encodings (as in ANSI).

    • 1