On a mac it’s easy. Use file -I “MyFile.txt” as a shell script. On Windows it’s near impossible without running a whole bunch or arbitrary tests that may or may not be correct - certainly not accurate.
What kind of text were you hoping to see? Was you looking for a particular encoding? If it is grammatical text there’s are a bunch or runs you can do to see what character sets are used but even then it’s only a ‘probably’/‘possibly’ response. Sean Cole Pi Digital > On 19 Mar 2020, at 20:31, Paul Dupuis via use-livecode > <use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote: > > This has come up many times before, but I'll ask once again in case > something has changed or someone new sees this. > > > Does anyone have a routine that will take a filespec to a text file and > return the guessed encoding of the text file? > > > First, please don't respond with your should know the encoding or the users > should know the encoding of their files. Not possible in the widely > uncontrolled real world. > > I do already have a routine to guess file encodings. It was written by > someone else. There are instances where it should work and does not. I fear > there may be errors in the algorithm and I do not have the original algorithm > to check it against. Hence, I am looking for an alternative that is either > free to use or to be licensed for a modest fee. > > My current routine attempts to return the encoding as a string that can be > directly passed to textDecode(binaryData,encoding) > > "ASCII" > "UTF-16" > "UTF-16BE" > "UTF-16LE" > "UTF-32" > "UTF-32BE" > "UTF-32LE" > "UTF-8" > "CP1252" * > "MacRoman" * > > * for these last 2, if the file is MacRoman on a Windows system, you actually > have to textDecode(macToISO(data),"CP1252") and if you have CP1252 on the > Mac, you need to do textDecode(isoToMac(data),"MacRoman"). There is an > enhancement request to support MacRoman decoding under WIndows and vice versa > at https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=22391 if you want to CC > yourself to show interest. > > > _______________________________________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription > preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
