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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T07:01:32+00:00

From the answers to this question it appears there’s a file somewhere on our

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From the answers to this question it appears there’s a file somewhere on our server that’s been saved with the wrong encoding.

I’ve seen this happen before – most often when pasting from Word into Visual Studio, when “smart quotes” can interfere with Visual Studio’s encoding settings when saving the file.

Thing is – the problem I’m having involves 20-30 different script files, include files and so on (hey, that was how we kept it modular back in the day…) and I really don’t want to open every one of them in Visual Studio and check the file encodings individually.

Is there any way I can analyze a folder tree full of files and spit out a list of each filename along with the text encoding used to save the file? (Or – if encodings aren’t clearly specified – work out what encoding Microsoft IIS thinks was used to save the file?)

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  1. Editorial Team

    A textfile’s encoding is just how it was intended to be interpreted, so you cannot detect this in a reliable way. You can probably detect UTF-8 and 16-bit unicode, but there’s no way distinguishing between ISO-8859-1/2/3/4 etc… (Windows-1250/1251/1252 etc.).

    If your document contains “weird” quotes, other than “” or ”, you can simply find these, and replace them manually.

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