The encoding that Notepad++ just calls “ANSI”, does anyone know what to call it for Ruby?

Question

I have a bunch of .txt's that Notepad++ says (in its drop-down "Encoding" menu) are "ANSI".

They have German characters in them, [äöüß], which display fine in Notepad++.

But they don't show up right in irb when I File.read 'this is a German text example.txt' them.

So does anyone know what argument I should give Encoding.default_external=?

(I'm assuming that'd be the solution, right?)

When 'utf-8' or 'cp850', it reads the "ANSI" file with "äöüß" in it as "\xE4\xF6\xFC\xDF"...

(Please don't hesitate to mention apparently "obvious" things in your answers; I'm pretty much as newbish as you can be and still know just enough to ask this question.)

Answer 1

What they mean is probably ISO/IEC 8859-1 (aka Latin-1), ISO-8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-15 (aka Latin-9) or Windows-1252 (aka CP 1252). All 4 of them have the ä at position 0xE4.

Answer 2

I found the answer to this question on the Notepad++ Forum, answered in 2010 by CChris who seems to be authoritative.

Question: Encoding ANSI?

Answer:

That will be the system code page for your computer (code page 0).

More Info:

Show your current code page.

>help chcp
Displays or sets the active code page number.

CHCP [nnn]

  nnn   Specifies a code page number.

Type CHCP without a parameter to display the active code page number.

>chcp
Active code page: 437

Code Page Identifiers

Identifier  .NET Name  Additional information
437         IBM437     OEM United States

Answer 3

I think it's 'cp1252', alias 'windows-1252'.

After reading Jörg's answer, I went back through the Encoding page on ruby-doc.org trying to find references to the specific encodings he mentioned, and that's when I spotted the Encodings.aliases method.

So I kludged up the method at the end of this answer.

Then I looked at the output in notepad++, viewing it as both 'ANSI' and utf-8, and compared that to the output in irb...

I could only find two places in the irb output where the utf-8 file was garbled in the exact same way it appeared in notepad++ when viewing it as 'ANSI', and those places were for cp1252 and cp1254.

cp1252 is apparently my 'filesystem' encoding, so I'm going with that.

I wrote a script to make copies of all the files converted to utf-8's, trying both from 1252 and 1254.

utf-8 regexes seem to work with both sets of files so far.

Now I have to try to remember what I was actually trying to accomplish before I ran into all these encoding headaches. xD

def compare_encodings file1, file2
    file1_probs = []
    file2_probs = []

    txt = File.open('encoding_test_output.txt','w')

    Encoding.aliases.sort.each do |k,v|
        Encoding.default_external=k
        ename = [k.downcase, v.downcase].join "  ---  "
        s = ""
        begin
            s << "#{File.read(file1)}" 
        rescue
            s << "nope nope nope"
            file1_probs << ename
        end
        s << "\t| #{ename} |\t"
        begin
            s << "#{File.read(file2)}"
        rescue
            s << "nope nope nope"
            file2_probs << ename
        end
        Encoding.default_external= 'utf-8'
        txt.puts s.center(58)
        puts s.center(58)
    end
    puts
    puts "file1, \"#{file1}\" exceptions from trying to convert to:\n\n"
    puts file1_probs
    puts
    puts "file2, \"#{file2}\" exceptions from trying to convert to:\n\n"
    puts file2_probs
    txt.close
end

compare_encodings "utf-8.txt", "np++'ANSI'.txt"