I read in tommy’s article on character encoding that the best general purpose encoding is utf-8 without BOM. I also saw many people saying that notepad++ is good, so i downloaded it. Anyway in notepad++ I dont think you can really choose UTF-8 without BOM. When you choose UTF, UTF without BOM is greyyed but it isnt when you choose ANSI, its bugged or something. Anyway any text-editors where you can choose UTF-8 without BOM without problems?
Also how can you check what encoding your saving a file as? (except for what that the text-editor is telling you)
Neb, I moved your thread since it wasn’t really related to accessibility or usability as such.
I’ve never used Notepad++, so I can’t help you there.
I use Vim, which lets me choose UTF-8 with no BOM – either as the default encoding or on a per-file basis. It’s got a steep learning threshold, though, so it’s not exactly everyone’s favourite editor.
You can’t really detect the encoding of an existing file. You can make educated guesses based on heuristics and statistical analysis, that’s all. If there’s a 2- or 3-octet BOM at the beginning of the file, the encoding is probably UTF-16 or UTF-8, respectively.
As long as you write in English and don’t use any exotic characters, UTF-8 without a BOM, ISO 8859-1, Windows-1252 and US ASCII are indistinguishable from one another.
Or something. I was a little confused by it too, but you were on the right path. Select both ANSI and UTF-8 without BOM.
The right end of the status bar at the bottom of the window will show the encoding as “ANSI as UTF-8”.
You’ll have to reselect this formating again when reloading such files, as utf-8 without BOM and ANSI look the same to Notepad++, and you wouldn’t want to resave an edited utf-8 page in just regular ANSI.