Opening a Unix file in Windows Notepad++?

0
votes

I receive a file from a supplier that I download per SFTP. Our systems are all working on Windows.

When I open the File in Notepad++ the status bar says "UNIX" and "UTF-8" The special characters aren't displayed correctly.

enter image description here

I tried to convert the file to the different formats Notepad++ allows but no one converted the char 'OSC' to the german letter 'ä'. Is this a known Unix-Windows-thing? My google-foo obviously isn't good enough.

  1. Which kind of conversion should I try to display the file correctly?
  2. How can I achieve the same programmatically in C#?
1
c#unixtextnotepad++codepages
It is marked as UNIX because the returns in unix are different from windows. The file is ASCII where characters 0-127 are the same and 128-255 are different depending on the language settings of the computer. – jdweng

1 Answers

2
votes

It is common on windows that a file's encoding doesn't match what the editor or even its xml header say it is. People are sloppy. Maybe it's really UTF-16, or the unstandard windows extended ascii thing which I think is probably cp-1252. (It's not common on *nix since we all usually just use utf-8, no need for others... not saying *nix users are much less sloppy)

To figure out which encoding it is, I would make a copy of the file, then delete the bits that are not a problem (leaving Mägenwil as the entire file) and then save, and use the linux command "file" which will tell what the right encoding is (reliable only for small files... it doesn't read the whole file; maybe notepad++ will do the exact same thing). The reason for deleting the other bits is that it might be a mix of UTF-8 which the editor has used for detection, plus something else.

I would try the iconv command in linux to test. For example:

iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 -o outfile infile

And any encoding conversion should be possible in C# or any featureful language, as long as you know how it was mutilated so you can reverse it. And if you find that it is part utf-8 and part something else, then remember not to convert the whole file, but only the important parts.