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For example I have a file on my disk: a.txt
I opened it in Hex mode and see no other signal character in it but plain text in UTF-8.
I am wondering how OS know it is UTF-8??
Thanks,
The OS doesn’t know. The hex editor is probably auto-detecting it. That’s possible by looking out for the presence and absence of specific byte pairs, but it’s not 100% reliable.
There is no general flag or property in which a file’s encoding is stored. That’s why you often need to specify the encoding manually when opening a text file.
One approach to mark a UTF-8 or -16 file is the BOM but that’s not mandatory.