How to get character encoding of a file in Linux

Are you trying to get character encoding of a file in Linux? Well, follow through this guide to learn some simple ways that you can use to find or get character encoding of file in Linux.

Getting character encoding of a file in Linux

In Linux, there a number of commands that you can use to get character encoding of a file.

Such commands include:

• file
• encguess
• NPM dfeal

Get character encoding of a file using file command in Linux

file is a command in Linux that is used to determine other file types. It can as well be used to determine or get the character encoding of files.

Assuming you have a file, file.txt, if you want to get its character encoding, run the command below;

file file.txt

Sample output;

file.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text

From the output, the character encoding of the file.txt is UTF-8.

You can also pass option -i/--mime to print the mime type strings such as text/plain; charset=us-ascii rather than ASCII text

file -i file.txt

Sample output;

file.txt: text/plain; charset=utf-8

If you want to omit filenames from the command output, use option -b/--brief.

file -ib file.txt

Sample output;

text/plain; charset=utf-8

Get character encoding of a file using encguess command in Linux

encguess is a command provided by the perl (Debian/Ubuntu) or perl/perl-Encode (RHEL based) package that can be used to guess character encodings of files.

The command line syntax;

encguess [options] filename

To use an example of my file above, file.txt;

encguess file.txt

Sample output;

file.txt	UTF-8

Read more on man pages, man encguess.

Get character encoding of a file using dfeal command in Linux

dfeal (detect-file-encoding-and-language) is an NPM command that is used determine the encoding and language of text files.

To install detect-file-encoding-and-language, you first need to install NPM;

Ubuntu/Debian;

sudo apt install nodejs npm -y

RHEL based distros, see how to install NPM.

Next, install dfeal command;

sudo npm install -g detect-file-encoding-and-language

Getting the character encoding;

dfeal file.txt

{
    "encoding": "UTF-8",
    "language": "spanish",
    "confidence": {
        "encoding": 1,
        "language": 0.02
    }
}

There could be more commands to get the character encoding for a file in Linux. Leave them in the comment section.

That marks the end of our guide on how to character encoding of a file in Linux.

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