Text UtilitiesLesson 104Free preview

Encoding Detector

This lesson is part of Web Developer Tools · All levels

Summary

Encoding detectors predict how text bytes should be interpreted, for example UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, or Windows-1252. Guess it helps when old files show strange characters like that. The results of detection are not always accurate because many encodings share the same byte pattern. The safest way is to know the source of the file and explicitly declare the charset.

Key points

Encoding maps the byte into characters
UTF-8 is a web standard and supports almost all languages
The UTF-8 BOM consists of an EF BB BF byte
Mojibake appears when the byte is read with the wrong encoding
Detection is predictive and needs verification

Full lesson

Code examples and quizzes

Full lessons, code examples, and quizzes are available to subscribers. 5 questions.