Unicode file in notepad

unicode unicode-string
FSm picture FSm · Dec 15, 2012 · Viewed 36.6k times · Source

What does it mean when I save a text file as "Unicode" in notepad? is it Utf-8, Utf-16 or Utf-32? Thanks in advance.

Answer

Jukka K. Korpela picture Jukka K. Korpela · Dec 15, 2012

In Notepad, as in Windows software in general, “Unicode” as an encoding name means UTF-16 Little Endian (UTF-16LE). (I first thought it’s not real UTF-16, because Notepad++ recognizes it as UCS-2 and shows the content as garbage, but re-checking with BabelPad, I concluded that Notepad can encode even non-BMP characters correctly.)

Similarly, “Unicode big endian” means UTF-16 Big Endian. And “ANSI” means the system’s native legacy encoding, e.g. the 8-bit windows-1252 encoding in Western versions of Windows.

Related questions

Python 3: os.walk() file paths UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode: surrogates not allowed

This code: for root, dirs, files in os.walk('.'): print(root) Gives me this error: UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcc3' in position 27: surrogates not allowed How do I walk through a file tree …

Read More
Convert hash.digest() to unicode

import hashlib string1 = u'test' hashstring = hashlib.md5() hashstring.update(string1) string2 = hashstring.digest() unicode(string2) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x8f in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) The string HAS to be unicode for it to be any …

Read More
Convert between string, u16string & u32string

I've been looking for a way to convert between the Unicode string types and came across this method. Not only do I not completely understand the method (there are no comments) but also the article implies that in future there …

Read More