How to see which encoding a text file uses

Jotter by Zaweba tells you in its status bar. Open the file and look at the bar along the bottom of the window. The status bar names the file's encoding: UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 or ANSI. It changes as you switch tabs, so each open file shows its own. That is all there is to it, with no dialog to open.

Knowing the encoding helps when a file shows odd characters, when a website or program insists on UTF-8, or when you are about to hand a file on and want to be sure what it is.

What encoding means

A text file is a row of bytes. The encoding is the rule for turning those bytes into letters. For plain English letters and numbers, most encodings agree, which is why the question rarely comes up. They differ on everything else: accented letters, currency signs, curly quotation marks, other alphabets and emoji.

Open a file with the wrong rule and those characters turn into strange pairs of symbols. That is the classic sign of an encoding mix-up.

The encodings Jotter shows

UTF-8 is the usual encoding on the web and on Linux and Mac systems, and it can store any character. UTF-8 with BOM is the same, with a small marker at the start of the file that announces it; some Windows programs add it and some tools dislike it. UTF-16 uses two or more bytes per character and turns up in files made by some Windows tools; Jotter handles both little and big endian. ANSI is the older Windows encoding, limited to a single set of characters.

Step by step

Open the file with File > Open, or drop it on the Jotter window; each file opens in a tab. Look at the status bar for the encoding. Next to it you'll see the line endings, CRLF for Windows or LF for Unix, which is often the next thing you need to know.

If you have several files to compare, open them all at once and step through the tabs with Ctrl+Tab, glancing at the status bar for each.

What happens when you save

Jotter keeps a file's encoding when it saves, so checking a file never changes it. Edit it, save it, and it is still the encoding it was.

There is one exception, and it protects your text. If an ANSI file gains characters that ANSI cannot hold, such as a symbol from another alphabet, Jotter saves it as UTF-8 instead, so nothing turns into question marks. The status bar will then show UTF-8 for that tab. If a program that reads the file needs ANSI, keep to characters it can store.

When the answer matters

Websites and many modern tools expect UTF-8. If a page shows garbled accents, the file may be ANSI. Configuration files for some programs must be in a particular encoding, and a BOM at the start can trip up scripts that read the first line. Data exports from older systems are often ANSI or UTF-16.

In each case, the first step is just to look, and Jotter by Zaweba makes looking a matter of glancing down. If you want to convert a file to a different encoding, Jotter isn't the tool for that, since it is built to keep files as they were.