Question

Can I use echo to generate an UTF-8 text file?
For example if I want to generate a file that contains the character ę:

echo "abcd ę" > out.txt

(the batch file is encoded with UTF-8)

the result is an ANSI encoded file and the ę character is transformed into ê.
How can I convince echo to generate an UTF-8 file?

If it’s not possible, then can I change the encoding of the text file after creating it?
Is there any tool in the gnuwin32 package that can help me to change the encoding?

thanks

Answer 1

The problem was that the file contained the line:

<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2" http-equiv=Content-Type> 

and then Notepad2 and Firefox was changing the charset, showing Ä instead of ę. In plain Notepad, the file looks ok.
The solution was to add the UTF-8 signature (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file:

echo1 -ne \xEF\xBB\xBF > out.htm

(echo1 is from gnuwin32)

thanks for the answers