How do I determine file encoding in OS X?

Question

I\'m trying to enter some UTF-8 characters into a LaTeX file in TextMate (which says its default encoding is UTF-8), but LaTeX doesn\'t seem to understand them.

Runn

Answer 1

Which LaTeX are you using? When I was using teTeX, I had to manually download the unicode package and add this to my .tex files:

% UTF-8 stuff
\usepackage[notipa]{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Now, I've switched over to XeTeX from the TeXlive 2008 package (here), it is even more simple:

% UTF-8 stuff
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}

As for detection of a file's encoding, you could play with file(1) (but it is rather limited) but like someone else said, it is difficult.