You can still have your code page, even though you can't pick it too!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/02/14 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/02/14/10267711.aspx


Yesterday, in response to 'Now that its been saved, how do I open it?', regular reader Cheong00 commented:

I think it could be opened in other editors (I think Notepad++ and UltraEdit can do let you specify to look at the file with which encoding).

It'd be cool if there's a way to manually selecting the open file code page too.

Btw, I just realized UTF16LE and UTF16BE aren't selectable code page in Internet Explorer, is there any reason for those codepage be leaved out from selection?

I suppose I can take those one at a time....

Nie yes of course, there are many editors that can handle multiple encodings.

I was sticking to Microsoft ones since the question didn't seem to shaped as a "what 3rd party tools are out there?" kind of inquiry.

It would indeed be cool if you could select the code page when you open the file. And there are actually a few programs that do this -- like Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Access, to give two examples....

Chenong00 is right on that last point -- you can't see or set either UTF16LE or UTF16BE on the big IE Endoding list:

The Big IE Encodings list is missing some entries, it wuld seem

But I'll let you in on a little secret that very few people know....

If your page is encoded in UTF16-LE or UTF16-BE, you can just load it, and if you right-click and choose Encoding, you'll see that IE can show what it detected just fine:

The small encodings list, with a Unicode entry added!         The small encodings list, with a Unicode (Big Endian) entry added!

Of course, it is using the same old naming scheme as we use in Notepad that everyone loves so much.

Well, we're noting if we aren't kinda consistent!

Now this trick works with I believe all of the detectable encodings you can find at Character Set Recognition.

So even though so many of them aren't on the big list of encodings you can choose....

You can still have your code page, even though you can't pick it too!


cheong00 on 14 Feb 2012 6:21 PM:

Wow, that's neat.

Have learnt a new thing today. :)

Michael S. Kaplan on 15 Feb 2012 7:13 AM:

I serve at the pleasure of the customer. :-)


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