In general a text file should be written with the Byte Order Mark BOM that represents the encoding used.

What is my text file encoding. We then check the bytes to see if the file is Unicode. The problem is the text file when you save it to the local desktop by clicking on save as the encoding is by default ANSI. However even reading the header you can never be sure what encoding a file is really using.

Did something go wrong when you encoded decoded a text string or text file but you are not sure what codepage the text was encoded and decoded with. File Encoding Checker is a GUI tool that allows you to validate the text encoding of one or more files. If the BOM does not exist you must decide what file encoding to default to based on the files.

Byte bytes FileReadAllBytesfilename. For example a file with the first three bytes 0xEF0xBB0xBF is probably a UTF-8 encoded file. Im working on a script which adds lines to the I386HIVEINF files in Windows 2000XP source.

Or it might be a different file type entirely binary. For text in several languages the required encoding may not be found at all. But outdated 8-bit encodings contain a limited set of characters.

Openmy in_file encodingUTF-16 wintext. When VS Code saves a file it uses a text encoding to decide what bytes each character becomes. However it might be an ISO-8859-1 file which happens to start.

OR openmy in_file. This check can easily be copied and adapted to detect many other encodings that use BOMs. With the file open in the editor either select File File Properties File Encoding from the main menu or click the File Encoding widget on the status bar and select the correct encoding of the file.