Is there a way to get the encoding of a text file in UltraEdit?

Question

Is there a setting in UltraEdit that allows me to see the encoding of the file?

Solution

In UltraEdit, the encoding that is being used to -display- the file, is shown in the status bar at the right somewhere, together with the line-ending type in use, for example, "U8-UNIX". You can also manually set as what encoding the file has to be displayed. In version 10 this is under menu View -> Set Code Page. You can also -convert- the actual codepage of the file under menu File -> Conversions.

If the file does not have a BOM header, a couple of bytes at the start of the file indicating the encoding, the -actual- encoding of the file, can only be guessed. And even if the file has a BOM header, there can still be encoding issues.

All text editors do this, and some are better at it than others. I haven't done a comparision to see which is best at it. At the moment (2012), I know UltraEdit fails to detect UTF-8 and other variants in 1000 line (or longer) text files if the first UTF-8 character only appears later in the document. It also fails to show the encoding properly when you set it manually.

Notepad++ is also not great at detecting it, but when you know the encoding, you can set it manually.

Sublime Text is, as far as I know, best at detecting the encoding, also in large files.

I think there are also some very good command line tools out there, ported from GNU to Windows, to detect encoding. My bet would be that that's going to be the best option.