如何检测文本的字符集？

Question

I have a text with diacritic characters that are displayed bad, like this: ¤ or ˇ or ˘. I don't know what charset the text was. Is there any easy way to figure it out? It would be nice if there is some online charset detector or maybe charset conversion previewer? I think about a application that would show me how some specific diacritic characters look like malformed in all available encodings so i would be able to track the one that fits into the chars i have in the text.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

In Windows PowerShell:

$bytes = [IO.File]::ReadAllBytes('some file.txt')
[Text.Encoding]::GetEncodings() |
  %{
    $_|Add-Member -pass Noteproperty Text ($_.GetEncoding().GetString($bytes))
  } | fl Name,Codepage,Text

Adjust the path to the file and browse the results until you see something that looks correct ;-)

This simply iterates through all encodings that are known to .NET and converts the text into a string using the respective encoding.