The Joomla .ini files require to be saved as UTF-8.
After editing I'm not sure if the files are UTF-8 or not.
Is there a Linux command like file or a few commands that would tell if a file is indeed UTF-8 or not?
4 Answers
You can determine the file encoding with the following command:
file -bi filename
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2@kojow7 utf-8 has no header. Pure ASCII (7-bit only), is indistinguishable from utf-8 (that is the point of it, a header will cause all sorts of problems). So if you have a file that is ASCII for the first MB then has a single UTF-8 character, then you will not know, unless you read the whole file. Apr 21, 2018 at 16:41
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6This should not be accepted as the answer. The 'file' command does not do that ; it reads only part of the file and uses magic numbers to take a best guess. On occasion 'file' can and will give you the incorrect answer. To verify if a file passes an encoding such as ascii, iso-8859-1, utf-8 or whatever then a good solution is to use the 'iconv' command.– TimMar 9, 2020 at 14:45
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There is, use the isutf8 command from the moreutils package.
Source: How can you tell if a file is UTF-8 encoded or not?
answered Feb 21, 2016 at 22:02
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@davidpostill I'm curious, is bad practice to cite the author in the reference? Aug 28, 2016 at 20:26
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1No. However, it is good practice to make the link say where it leads me. Assume I'm reading only the blue text. After the edit, I can tell why and when I should click that. Before, I could not. (It wasn't me who made the edit but I'm like 94% sure that this is what it was about.) Dec 31, 2018 at 0:00
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Nice, and works nicely with
find -type f -exec isutf8 {} +, because it also quotes the filename. (And with usingfind ... -exec ... +is also fast) Mar 22, 2019 at 13:28
Do not use the file command. It does not inspect the whole file, and it basically guesses. It sometimes gives incorrect answers.
You can verify if a file happens to pass UTF-8 encoding like this:
$ iconv -f utf8 <filename> -t utf8 -o /dev/null
A return code of zero means it passes UTF8. A non-zero return code means it is not valid UTF8.
It is not possible to know if a file was necessarily exported using any particular encoding scheme, as some encoding schemes overlap. To do that would require metadata to be embedded in the file, and even then you would be placing trust in whoever generated that file, rather than validating it yourself... and you should always validate it yourself.
Yet another way is to use recode, which will exit with an error if it tries to decode UTF-8 and encounters invalid characters.
if recode utf8/..UCS < "$FILE" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo "Valid utf8 : $FILE"
else
echo "NOT valid utf8: $FILE"
fi
fileis an example of a program doing smart guesses.