I have a Wireshark capture file that contains some XML encoded in UTF8. Unfortunately Wireshark doesn't play well with UTF8 so I have strings like ש×\231×\227×\225ת in my file. How can I decode these or, even better, let Wireshark decode these on the fly?
Something gets mangled when Wireshark saves the file as text. I ended up saving the bytes to file and writing a ruby script to interpret them as UTF8. I'm sure there's a better solution but I don't know what it is.
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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.
Is it possible to encode the output of a grep command in UTF-8 no matter what the encoding of the input file was?
I execute a grep statement in a python script (subprocess) and I want to guarantee the resulting bytes are UTF-8.
Example:
grep -P "ÄA" -m -1 file.txt
I dont know the input encoding of the file...
Grep follows the UNIX philosophy, that is, it does one thing, and it does this one thing well. File encoding is not part of that one thing.
That's what other tools are for. There is another tool that does character decoding and encoding well, called iconv. Use that to change the encoding of the input file to UTF-8.
This does require you to know the input file encoding. If you don't know, you have to guess, based on heuristic analysis of the input file (it'll be hard to be certain, recognising that something has been decoded using the wrong codec usually requires a human to verify the result). There is a tool for that too, called enca. This tool can also do the conversion once a guess has been made. It usually is a separate install (it is not part of the common default POSIX toolset). See How to auto detect text file encoding? over on Super User for more options.
Note however, given that codec guessing tools need to do so by using statistical analysis, it is better to do the guessing on the input file, not on the output of grep.
None of this has anything to do with Python, of course. Except if you wanted to do the encoding detection in Python instead, at which point you'd want to look at the chardet library.
I was wondering how Windows interprets characters.
I made a file with a hex editor with the 3 bytes E3 81 81.
Those bytes are the ぁ character in UTF-8.
I opened the notepad and it displayed ぁ. I didn't specify the encoding of the file, I just created the bytes and the notepad interpreted it correctly.
Is notepad somehow guessing the encoding?
Or is the hex editor saving those bytes with a specific encoding?
If the file only contains these three bytes, then there is no information at all about which encoding to use.
A byte is just a byte, and there is no way to include any encoding information in it. Besides, the hex editor doesn't even know that you intended to decode the data as text.
Notepad normally uses ANSI encoding, so if it reads the file as UTF-8 then it has to guess the encoding based on the data in the file.
If you save a file as UTF-8, Notepad will put the BOM (byte order mark) EF BB BF at the beginning of the file.
Notepad makes an educated guess. I don't know the details, but loading the first few kilobytes and trying to convert them from UTF-8 is very simple, so it probably does something similar to that.
...and sometimes it gets it wrong...
https://ychittaranjan.wordpress.com/2006/06/20/buggy-notepad/
There is an easy and efficient way to check whether a file is in UTF-8. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UTF-8&oldid=581360767#Advantages, fourth bullet point. Notepad probably uses this.
Wikipedia claims that Notepad used the IsTextUnicode function, which checks whether a patricular text is written in UTF-16 (it may have stopped using it in Windows Vista, which fixed the "Bush hid the facts" bug): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts.
how to identify the file is in which encoding ....?
Go to the file and try to Save As... and you can see the default (current) encoding of the file (in which encoding it is saved).
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'm downloading via FTP some files with chinese names (BIG5 encoded), and Filezilla displays those filenames as garbage (as FTP cannot handle any encoding other than ASCII and UTF-8, as least the standard compliant ones).
Given a filename with garbled characters, is it possible for me to repair the encoding and get a proper filename String given that I already know the source encoding? Will the FTP client misinterpreting BIG5 as UTF-8 insert bytes that make conversion back to BIG5 difficult?
My proposed steps (in Java):
1. get the garbled filename using File object.
2. getbytes using UTF-8.
3. create a new string using those bytes in BIG5.
4. Write the decoded filename back to the file.
Will the above method work?
Not every sequence of bytes is a valid ASCII or UTF-8 string so it's quite likely that some of the bytes will have been discarded, converted to the replacement character, or otherwise irreversibly mangled. So it looks like you won't be able to retrieve the original filenames if they have been modified by FileZilla to become correctly formed UTF-8 or ASCII.
You might be lucky to be able to get a certain percentage of the original characters back, where they just happened to be both valid BIG5 and valid UTF-8, but I doubt you will be able to recover the entire filename.
You could post a few examples of your garbled filenames (as raw bytes encoded in hex) to get a more definite answer. That way we can see exactly what the damage is.