I have a CSV with content that is UTF-8 encoded. However, various applications and systems errorneously detect the encoding of the CSV as Windows-1252, which breaks all the special characters in the file (e.g. Umlauts).
I can see that Sublime Text (on Windows) for example also automatically detects the wrong Windows-1252 encoding, when opening the file for the first time, showing garbled text where special characters are supposed to be.
When I choose Reopen with Encoding » UTF-8, everything will look fine, as expected.
Now, to find the source of the error I thought it might help to figure out, why these applications are not automatically detecting the correct encoding in the first place. May be there is a stray character somewhere with the wrong encoding for example.
The CSV in question is actually an automatically generated product export of a Magento 2 installation. Recently the character encodings broke and I am currently trying to figure out what happened - hence my investigation on why this export is detected as Windows-1252.
Is there any reliable way of figuring out why the automatic detection of applications like Sublime Text assume the wrong character encoding?
This is what I did in the end to find out why the file was not detected as UTF-8, i.e. to find the characters that were not encoded in UTF-8. Since PHP is more readily available to me, I decided to simply use the following script, to force convert anything that is not UTF-8 to UTF-8, using the very handy neitanod/forceutf8 library.
$before = file_get_contents('export.csv');
$after = \ForceUTF8\Encoding::toUTF8($before);
file_put_contents('export.fixed.csv', $after);
Then I used a file comparison tool like Beyond Compare to compare the two resulting CSVs, in order to see more easily which characters were not originally encoded in UTF-8.
This in turn showed me that only one particular column of the export was affected. Upon further investigation I found out that the contents of that column were processed in PHP with the following preg_replace:
$value = preg_replace('/([^\pL0-9 -])+/', '', $value);
Using \p in the regular expression had an unknown side effect: all the special characters were converted to another encoding. A quick solution to this is to use the u flag on the regex (see regex pattern modifiers reference). This forces the resulting encoding of this preg_replace to be UTF-8. See also this answer.
Related
Character conversion problem.
I have a few strings which are incorrectly encoded or decoded.
The strings came in an ASCII format CSV file.
The current strings I have are:
N‚met
Tet‹
I know, that the:
"‚" character (0x82) should be originally "é" (é acute accent)
"‹" character (0x8B) should be originally "ő" (o double acute accent)
How can I debug and reverse engineer, what conversions happened with the original characters to get the current characters?
I suppose that multiple decoding encoding happened, but I was not able to reproduce the original character.
I put an expanded version of my comment as answer:
Your viewer uses CP1252 (English and Western Europe, also called ANSI in Windows) or CP1250 (Eastern Europe) or an other similar code page. Most of characters are coded in the same manner, just few language specific changes. Your example do not includes character that are different on the two encoding, so I cannot say precisely.
That code pages are used on Microsoft Windows, and they are based (but not 100% compatible) with Latin-1, so it is common to see text interpreted with such encoding. MacOs and Linux are heavily (now) UTF-8 encoded. Windows uses Unicode internally (but UTF-16)
The old encoding is probably CP437: the standard code page in DOS, so it was used frequently also for CSV files. Other frequent old encoding are CP850 (Western Europe) and CP852 (Central Europe).
For the other answers you put in the comments, I think you should go to Superuser (if you are requesting tools (some editors allow you to specify the encoding. You may use the browser (opening a local file): browsers also allow you to choose the local encoding, and I think you may copy as Unicode [not sure], other tools sometime has hidden option to import files, but possibly not with all options), or as new question in this site, if you want to do it programmatically. But so you are required to specify the language. Python is well suited for such conversions (most scripting languages are created to handle texts): python has built in many encoding, you should just specify when reading and when writing the files. R also can be instructed on the input encoding.
I wrote my own utility that helped me to diagnose and fix many thorny encoding issues. It is available as part of an Open source library. The utility converts any String to unicode sequence and vise-versa. All you will have to do is:
String codes = StringUnicodeEncoderDecoder.encodeStringToUnicodeSequence("Hello world");
And it will return String "\u0048\u0065\u006c\u006c\u006f\u0020\u0057\u006f\u0072\u006c\u0064"
The same would work for any String in any language including special characters. Here is the link to the article Open Source Java library with stack trace filtering, Silent String parsing Unicode converter and Version comparison that explains about the library and where to get it (available both on Maven central and github. In the article search for paragraph: "String Unicode converter". So when you read your String convert it and see what comes up. This way you will see what symbols are there and if the info is correct and only distorted by some wrong encoding or the info itself is lost. You can easily find info on internet that provides tables of mapping of any symbol to a unicode
I get text file of random encoding format, usc-2le, ansi, utf-8, usc-2be etc. I have to convert this files to utf8.
For conversion am using the following command
iconv options -f from-encoding -t utf-8 <inputfile > outputfile
But if incorrect from-encoding is provided, then incorrect file is generated.
I want a way to find the input file encoding type.
Thanks in advance
On Linux you could try using file(1) on your unknown input file. Most of the time it would guess the encoding correctly. Or else try several encodings to iconv till you "feel" that the result is acceptable (for example if you know that the file is some Russian poetry, you might try KOI-8, UTF-8, etc.... till you recognize a good Russian poem).
But character encoding is a nightmare and can be ambiguous. The provider of the file should tell you what encoding he used (and there is no way to get that encoding reliably and in all cases : there are some byte sequences which would be valid and interpreted differently with various encodings).
(notice that the HTTP protocol mentions and explicits the encoding)
In 2017, better use UTF-8 everywhere (and you should follow that http://utf8everywhere.org/ link) so ask your human partners to send you UTF-8 (hopefully most of your files are in UTF-8, since today they all should be).
(so encoding is more a social issue than a technical one)
I get text file of random encoding format
Notice that "random encoding" don't exist. You want and need to find out what character encoding (and file format) has been used by the provider of that file (so you mean "unknown encoding", not "random" one).
BTW, do you have a formal, unambiguous, sound and precise definition of text file, beyond file without zero bytes, or files with few control characters? LaTeX, C source, Markdown, SQL, UUencoding, shar, XPM, and HTML files are all text files, but very different ones!
You probably want to expect UTF-8, and you might use the file extension as some hint. Knowing the media-type could help.
(so if HTTP has been used to transfer the file, it is important to keep (and trust) the Content-Type...; read about HTTP headers)
[...] then incorrect file is generated.
How do you know that the resulting file is incorrect? You can only know if you have some expectations about that result (e.g. that it contains Russian poetry, not junk characters; but perhaps these junk characters are some bytecode to some secret interpreter, or some music represented in weird fashion, or encrypted, etc....). Raw files are just sequences of bytes, you need some extra knowledge to use them (even if you know that they use UTF-8).
We do file encoding conversion with
vim -c "set encoding=utf8" -c "set fileencoding=utf8" -c "wq" filename
It's working fine , no need to give source encoding.
We have a content rendering site that displays content in multiple languages. The site is built using JSP and content fetched from Oracle DB. All our pages are UTF-8 compliant.
When displaying zh/jp content, out of the complete content, only some of the character appear garbled (square boxes on IE and diamond question marks on FF). The data in DB does not have any garbled character. Since we dont understand the language, we dont know what characters are problematic. Would appreciate some pointers to the solution please. Could it be that some characters may be appearing invalid to the browsers?
Example in FF:
ネット犯���者 がアプ
脆弱性保護機能 - ネット犯���者 がアプリケーションのセキュリティホール (脆弱性) を突いて、パソコンに脅威を侵入させることを阻止します。
In doubt on the sanity of a UTF-8 encoding, you can always re-encode it either with a good text editor or with a specialized tool like iconv :
iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 yourfile > youfile2
If your file is indeed invalid, iconv will also give you some information on the problem.
But, another way you might want to explore is installing new fonts for Far East languages…
Indeed, not knowing the actual bytes used in your file, it is hard to say why their are replaced with a replacement character � (U+FFFD). Thus, you might want to post a hex dump of the parts of your file that do not work.
I'm encountering a little problem with my file encodings.
Sadly, as of yet I still am not on good terms with everything where encoding matters; although I have learned plenty since I began using Ruby 1.9.
My problem at hand: I have several files to be processed, which are expected to be in UTF-8 format. But I do not know how to batch convert those files properly; e.g. when in Ruby, I open the file, encode the string to utf8 and save it in another place.
Unfortunately that's not how it is done - the file is still in ANSI.
At least that's what my Notepad++ says.
I find it odd though, because the string was clearly encoded to UTF-8, and I even set the File.open parameter :encoding to 'UTF-8'. My shell is set to CP65001, which I believe also corresponds to UTF-8.
Any suggestions?
Many thanks!
/e: What's more, when in Notepad++, I can convert manually as such:
Selecting everything,
copy,
setting encoding to UTF-8 (here, \x-escape-sequences can be seen)
pasting everything from clipboard
Done! Escape-characters vanish, file can be processed.
Unfortunately that's not how it is done - the file is still in ANSI. At least that's what my Notepad++ says.
UTF-8 was designed to be a superset of ASCII, which means that most of the printable ASCII characters are the same in UTF-8. For this reason it's not possible to distinguish between ASCII and UTF-8 unless you have "special" characters. These special characters are represented using multiple bytes in UTF-8.
It's well possible that your conversion is actually working, but you can double-check by trying your program with special characters.
Also, one of the best utilities for converting between encodings is iconv, which also has ruby bindings.
I would like to write a Ruby script which writes Japanese characters to the console. For example:
puts "こんにちは・今日は"
However, I get an exception when running it:
jap.rb:1: Invalid char `\377' in expression
jap.rb:1: Invalid char `\376' in expression
Is it possible to do? I'm using Ruby 1.8.6.
You've saved the file in the UTF-16LE encoding, the one Windows misleadingly calls “Unicode”. This encoding is generally best avoided because it's not an ASCII-superset: each code unit is stored as two bytes, with ASCII characters having the other byte stored as \0. This will confuse an awful lot of software; it is unusual to use UTF-16 for file storage.
What you are seeing with \377 and \376 (octal for \xFF and \xFE) is the U+FEFF Byte Order Mark sequence put at the front of UTF-16 files to distinguish UTF-16LE from UTF-16BE.
Ruby 1.8 is totally byte-based; it makes no attempt to read Unicode characters from a script. So you can only save source files in ASCII-compatible encodings. Normally, you'd want to save your files as UTF-8 (without BOM; the UTF-8 faux-BOM is another great Microsoft innovation that breaks everything). This'd work great for scripts on the web producing UTF-8 pages.
And if you wanted to be sure the source code would be tolerant of being saved in any ASCII-compatible encoding, you could encode the string to make it more resilient (if less readable):
puts "\xe3\x81\x93\xe3\x82\x93\xe3\x81\xab\xe3\x81\xa1\xe3\x81\xaf\xe3\x83\xbb\xe4\xbb\x8a\xe6\x97\xa5\xe3\x81\xaf"
However! Writing to the console is itself a big problem. What encoding is used to send characters to the console varies from platform to platform. On Linux or OS X, it's UTF-8. On Windows, it's a different encoding for every installation locale (as selected on “Language for non-Unicode applications” in the “Regional and Language Options” control panel entry), but it's never UTF-8. This setting is—again, misleadingly—known as the ANSI code page.
So if you are using a Japanese Windows install, your console encoding will be Windows code page 932 (a variant of Shift-JIS). If that's the case, you can save the text file from a text editor using “ANSI” or explicitly “Japanese cp932”, and when you run it in Ruby you'll get the right characters out. Again, if you wanted to make the source withstand misencoding, you could escape the string in cp932 encoding:
puts "\x82\xb1\x82\xf1\x82\xc9\x82\xbf\x82\xcd\x81E\x8d\xa1\x93\xfa\x82\xcd"
But if you run it on a machine in another locale, it'll produce different characters. You will be unable to write Japanese to the default console from Ruby on a Western Windows installation (code page 1252).
(Whilst Ruby 1.9 improves Unicode handling a lot, it doesn't change anything here. It's still a bytes-based application using the C standard library IO functions, and that means it is limited to Windows's local code page.)