Section 6.8. Auto-Detecting the Encoding
6.8. Auto-Detecting the EncodingThe encoding of data should be explicitly told to any potential recipient. In particular, on the Internet, special headers have been designed for informing the encoding of a web page or a message, as described in Chapter 10. However, quite often we are faced with data that is known or suspected to be in a Unicode encoding, but we don't know which. Moreover, we might not wish to trust the indication of the encoding without performing some simple checks. Table 6-4 presents basic methods for guessing the encoding from the first few octets of data. Beware that the result is at best a good guess. The second column shows how the first few octets, shown in column one in hexadecimal, look when interpreted according to the ISO-8859-1 encoding (which is what many simple editors and software for dumping data in text format use by default). If the data starts in some other way, it could still be in a Unicode encoding, but without a byte order mark.
|
ÿ