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 N

Answer 1

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"