MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - how can I determine source ( txt ) encoding ?

cybmole · 01-26-2011, 08:36 AM

ok - well eventually, cp1250 was the answer.
utf8 made a mess with lots of black diamonds.

playing with settings after opening txt in in notepad++ gave me values of 92. 93. 94 on the problem characters when converting to utf8 with that program but I could not see how to use that info.

Opening the txt in word looked clean, but after saving it as filtered Html & then reimporting & reconverting, the heuristic engine did not clean up line feeds like it did for txt.

- so I reverted to trying txt to epub & trying all options in the encoding drop down list until I got a result.

if that drop down had not been pre-populated with possible solutions, I'd have been lost!

PS txt looked ok when opened in firefox but I did not see how to get firefox to tell me the encoding - under view - I saw autodetect=off & characte set = western iso 8859

( when I say looked OK in firefox, it looked like the posted example with an opening slanted quote. after converting to cp1250, it has proper curly quotes in the epub & looked nicer.

I guess I should go google cp1250 1251 1252 & learn lots of stuff I never really wanted to have to know!....

& google says
"CP1250 is Eastern European (not ISO-8859-2) CP1251 is Cyrillic (not ISO-8859-5) CP1252 is Western European (not ISO-8859-1)... "

so the non-geeky explanation is that my text was in eastern euopean encoding ?

01-26-2011, 08:36 AM	#3
cybmole Wizard Posts: 3,720 Karma: 1759970 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: none	ok - well eventually, cp1250 was the answer. utf8 made a mess with lots of black diamonds. playing with settings after opening txt in in notepad++ gave me values of 92. 93. 94 on the problem characters when converting to utf8 with that program but I could not see how to use that info. Opening the txt in word looked clean, but after saving it as filtered Html & then reimporting & reconverting, the heuristic engine did not clean up line feeds like it did for txt. - so I reverted to trying txt to epub & trying all options in the encoding drop down list until I got a result. if that drop down had not been pre-populated with possible solutions, I'd have been lost! PS txt looked ok when opened in firefox but I did not see how to get firefox to tell me the encoding - under view - I saw autodetect=off & characte set = western iso 8859 ( when I say looked OK in firefox, it looked like the posted example with an opening slanted quote. after converting to cp1250, it has proper curly quotes in the epub & looked nicer. I guess I should go google cp1250 1251 1252 & learn lots of stuff I never really wanted to have to know!.... & google says "CP1250 is Eastern European (not ISO-8859-2) CP1251 is Cyrillic (not ISO-8859-5) CP1252 is Western European (not ISO-8859-1)... " so the non-geeky explanation is that my text was in eastern euopean encoding ? Last edited by cybmole; 01-26-2011 at 08:38 AM.