I have two files in a windows folder. Using the technique described here I found out that one file encoding is ANSI and another one is UTF-8.
However, If I open cmd or Powershell and try to get the encoding in IRB with the following code I get always "CP850":
File.open(file_name).read.encoding.name # => CP850
or
File.open(file_name).external_encoding.name # => CP850
Notepad++ also gives me that one file is ANSI and another is UTF-8.
How can I get the proper encoding using Ruby in Windows?
It is impossible to tell what encoding a file is, but it's possible to make an educated guess.
When you open a file, ruby simply assumes it's encoded with the default 8-bit encoding (in your case CP850).
See Detect encoding
and What is ANSI format? about ANSI
Related
I am trying to create a duplicate file finder for Windows. My program works well in Linux. But it writes NUL characters to the log file in Windows. This is due to the MBCS default file system encoding of Windows, while the file system encoding in Linux is UTF-8. How can I convert MBCS to UTF-8 to avoid this error?
Tell Python to use UTF-8 on the log file. In Python 3 you do this by:
open(..., encoding='utf-8')
If you want to convert an MBCS string to UTF-8 you can switch string encodings:
filename.encode('mbcs').decode('utf-8')
Use filename.encode(sys.getdefaultencoding())... to make the code work on Linux, as well.
Just change the encode to 'latin-1' (encoding='latin-1')
Using pure Python:
open(..., encoding = 'latin-1')
Using Pandas:
pd.read_csv(..., encoding='latin-1')
In the ruby file:
p __ENCODING__
#<Encoding:US-ASCII>
In vim:
set encoding?
encoding=utf-8
This is causing me grief (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14495486/ruby-syntax-error-with-multiple-language-in-hash), which is patched but I still don't understand why the file shows as ASCII by ruby and utf-8 by vim.
As #melpomene commented, :set encoding tells you what encoding is used internally by Vim.
:set fileencoding will tell you what encoding Vim decided to use for your document. The possible values are given by the fileencodings option. ASCII is not part of the default list as it's usually handled transparently by the other encodings listed.
But that part of your question is puzzling me:
but I still don't understand why the file is ASCII
because it looks like you actively want that file to be treated as ASCII by the interpreter.
Anyway, that encoding directive is only used by Ruby: it doesn't mean that the file is actually encoded as ASCII or that Vim is supposed to care about it and treat it in a special way.
In short, whether your file is actually encoded in ASCII or not, Vim doesn't care.
So… what do you want exactly? That vim sets its fileencoding option to ASCII when you open a supposedly ASCII file? That your supposedly ASCII file be converted to another encoding?
edit
With that directive, you explicitely tell Ruby that the file's content must be treated as ASCII and Ruby says "OK, that's ASCII, if you say so.".
This directive doesn't change anything to the actual encoding of the file. It could be utf-8, latin1 or whatever.
Vim doesn't understand that directive.
Vim chooses the encoding it uses for that file according to a number of rules you should read about in :h encoding, :h fileencoding and :h fileencodings.
Vim doesn't treat ASCII in a special "ASCII" way, it just handles it has the subset of utf-8 that it is.
So, before we go further, please verify:
the encoding of the file with something like $ file /path/to/file
the fileencoding Vim uses for that file with :set fileencoding
I'm trying to run a file (ruby anyfile.rb in cmd prompt) with the following contents:
# encoding: utf-8
puts 'áá'
happens the following error:
invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)
It seems that Ruby does not understand the magic comment...
EDIT: If I remove the "# encoding: utf-8" and run the command prompt like this:
ruby-E:UTF-8 encoding.rb
then it works - any ideas?
EDIT2: when i run:
ruby -e 'p [Encoding.default_external, Encoding.default_internal]'
i got [#Encoding:CP850, nil], maybe my Encoding.default_external is wrong?!
Environment:
Windows XP (yes, I also hate windows + ruby)
ruby 1.9.2p180 (2011-02-18) [i386-mingw32]
I believe this is a classic case of "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras".
The error message is telling you that you have a byte sequence in your file that is not a valid UTF-8 multibyte sequence.
It is definitely possible that
It seems that Ruby does not understand the magic comment...
as you say, and that up until now nobody noticed that magic comments don't actually work because you are the first person in the history of humankind to actually try to use magic comments. (Actually, this is not possible. If Ruby didn't understand magic comments, it would complain about an invalid ASCII character, since ASCII is the default encoding if no magic comment is present.)
Or, there actually is an invalid multibyte UTF-8 sequence in your file.
Which do you think is more likely? If I were you, I would check my file.
I've encountered similar issues from time to time with files that were not saved as UTF-8, even when the magic comment states so.
I've found that Ruby 1.9.2 had issues to properly convert UTF-8 to codepages 850 and 437, the defaults for command prompt on Windows.
I do recommend you upgrade to Ruby 1.9.3 (latest is patchlevel 125) which solves a lot of encoding issues, specially on Windows.
Also, to verify that your saved file do not contain a Unicode BOM (so it is plain UTF) and is properly saved.
To verify that, you can switch the codepage in the console to unicode (chcp 65001) and try type myscript.rb
You should see the accented letters correctly.
Last but no least, ensure your command prompt uses a TrueType font so extended characters are properly displayed.
Hope that helps.
Try
# encoding: iso-8859-1
Not everything that's text is utf8.
Are you sure you selected 'UTF-8' from the Encoding dropdown when you saved the file in Notepad? I've just tried this on an XP machine and your code example worked for me.
I just upgraded from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9, and most of my text processing scripts now fail with the error invalid byte sequence in UTF-8. I need to either strip out the invalid characters or specify that Ruby should use ASCII encoding instead (or whatever encoding the C stdio functions write, which is how the files were produced) -- how would I go about doing either of those things?
Preferably the latter, because (as near as I can tell) there's nothing wrong with the files on disk -- if there are weird, invalid characters they don't appear in my editor...
What's your locale set to in the shell? In Linux-based systems you can check this by running the locale command and change it by e.g.
$ export LANG=en_US
My guess is that you are using locale settings which have UTF-8 encoding and this is causing Ruby to assume that the text files were created according to utf-8 encoding rules. You can see this by trying
$ LANG=en_GB ruby -e 'warn "foo".encoding.name'
US-ASCII
$ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 ruby -e 'warn "foo".encoding.name'
UTF-8
For a more general treatment of how string encoding has changed in Ruby 1.9 I thoroughly recommend
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string
(code examples assume bash or similar shell - C-shell derivatives are different)
I'm not very familiar using ruby with binary data. I'm using mechanize to download a large number of csv files to my local disk. I then need to search these files for specific strings.
I use the save_as method in mechanize to save the file (which saves the file as binary). The content type of the file (according to mechanize) is:
application/vnd.ms-excel;charset=x-UTF-16LE-BOM
From here, I'm not sure how to read the file. I've tried reading it in as a normal file in ruby, but I just get the binary data. I've also tried just using standard unix tools (strings/grep) to try and search without any luck.
When I run the 'file' command on one of the files, I get:
foo.csv: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode Pascal program text, with very long lines, with CRLF, CR, LF line terminators
I can see the data just fine with cat or vi. With vi I also see some control characters.
I've also tried both the csv and fastercsv ruby libraries, but I get 'IllegalFormatError' exception for these. I've also tried this solution without any luck.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
You can use the command 'iconv' to conver to UTF-8,
# iconv -f 'UTF-16LE' -t 'UTF-8' bad_file.csv > good_file.csv
There is also a wrapper for iconv in the standard library, you could use that to convert the file after reading it into your program.