The origins of the information on this site may be internal or external to Progress Software Corporation (“Progress”). Therefore the 'Open files with Encoding' menu allows users to display the text files with the correct character encoding.

However sometimes the text is not displayed with the correct encoding. Some advanced text editors attempt to determine the file encoding and succeed most of the time. 'UTF-8 without BOM' files don't have any header bytes.'UTF-8 with BOM' files which have the BOM header bytes.In fact, there are 2 types of UTF-8 files. Or it might be a different file type entirely (binary)Īlso, the absence of BOM in the beginning of the file does not necessarily means the file is not UTF-8 encoded.

However, it might be an ISO-8859-1 file which happens to start with the characters ï»¿. The byte order mark is a Unicode character used to signal the endianness (byte order) of a text file or stream.Ī file with the first three bytes 0圎F,0xBB,0xBF is probably a UTF-8 encoded file. In fact the header can indicate an encoding while in reality the file is encoded with another character set.Īnother example is the presence of the so-called Byte Order Mark (BOM) as the first character of a text file. However, even reading the header, it is not possible to be 100% certain what encoding a file is really using. For an XML file, the header appears as something similar to: Some files, such as XML files, generally indicate their encoding with a file header. Detecting the (non-binary) file encoding is not trivial, and is not restricted to the scope Progress-powered applications.

Text encoding online