up vote 12 down vote favorite
4
share [g+] share [fb]

Say I am editing some file with vim (or gvim). I have no idea about the file's encoding and I want to know whether it is in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 or whatever? Can I somehow tell vim to show me what encoding is used?

link|improve this question
100% accept rate
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 17 down vote accepted

The fileencoding setting shows the current buffer's encoding:

:set fileencoding
fileencoding=utf8

There really isn't a common way to determine the encoding of a plaintext file, as that information isn't saved in the file itself - except UTF-8 Files where you've got a so called BOM which indicates the Encoding. This is why xml and html files have charset metatags.

You can enforce a particular encoding with the 'encoding' setting. See :help encoding and :help fileencoding in Vim for how the editor handles these settings. You can also add several fileencoding settings to your vimrc to have vim try detecting based on the ones listed.

link|improve this answer
Perfect. Even if somewhat counter intuitive. Thank you! – innaM Aug 24 '09 at 13:56
2  
Unfortunatelly, not correct. For Vim cannot find the encoding of the file you're reading. It is not written in the file. It can only guess based on the available characters in the file. For example a file with the text "abcdef" can be in several encodings, since practically all support those characters, but a file with "šđčćž" will likely be in CP1252. So, you're not reading the encoding from somewhere, but guessing what encoding could that be, and based on that displaying it properly. – ldigas Aug 24 '09 at 14:29
2  
What you are doing here is explicitly setting the encoding, based on your observations of the file's contents. If you wish for vim to try several encoding, when opening a file, put several of them in the option in your _vimrc. – ldigas Aug 24 '09 at 14:32
@ldigas, thanks for the feedback, I've updated the answer to be a bit more clear on that (I hope!) – jtimberman Aug 24 '09 at 15:18
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.