• Text Viewer User's Guide
    • Introduction to Text Viewer
    • How to ...
      • Open Text Files
      • Move Around a File
      • Close a File
      • Text Encoding
      • Show or Hide the Ruler
      • Change Font Size
      • Show DOS Line Draw Characters
      • Find Text
      • Select Text
      • Copy Text
      • Save All or Part of a File
      • Print All or Part of a File
      • Change the Print Page Setup
      • Change Windows
      • Viewing CSPro Data Files
      • Get Help
    • Summaries

Text Encoding

An encoding defines how a text file's bytes are interpreted as characters. Most modern programs use UTF-8, a variable-length encoding scheme that uses between one and four bytes to represent a character.
Historically, to differentiate a UTF-8 file from a file encoded in a format such as ANSI, a byte order mark (BOM) would be added to the beginning of the file, specifying its encoding. Since UTF-8 has been widely adopted, most programs now use the UTF-8 encoding without a BOM.
When Text Viewer opens a file, if no BOM is present, the file is assumed to be encoded in UTF-8. If you are opening an old file that was encoded as ANSI, you can change the way that Text Viewer displays the file by selecting Encoding -> ANSI. If the file has a BOM, Text Viewer determines how to display the file based on the characters of the BOM.
Text Viewer supports the following encodings:
  • ANSI
  • UTF-8
  • UTF-16 LE
See also: Menu Summary