Announcing Encoding utility
- From: Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ProgrammingBlind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Program-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, GUISpeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:11:30 -0400 (EDT)
Now available at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/Encoding.zip
Encoding
Version 1.0
August 8, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Jamal Mazrui
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
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Contents
Description
Installation
Operation
Development Notes
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Description
Encoding is a free, open source, command-line utility for performing
encoding-related operations on files. It can show the encoding of files,
and convert between different encodings. Batch operations are supported
if wildcard characters are used in the file specification. The
executable, Encoding.exe, should run on any version of Windows. The
source code, Encoding.py, should run on other platforms as well.
An encoding is an agreement about how to represent textual characters with
computer bytes. Characters are encoded as byte sequences that may be
stored in disk files or computer memory. A byte stream is decoded to
produce characters in a human language. If a text file is not readable,
the reason may be that it has an encoding that was either not recognized
or not decoded properly. This utility may help with such issues,
benefiting software developers or end users. It works with over a hundred
character encodings.
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Installation
Unarchive Encoding.zip into a directory, e.g., into
C:\Encoding
Run Encoding.exe at a command prompt, e.g., one created by entering
cmd.exe
at the Windows Start/Run prompt.
Since Encoding is developed in a cross-platform language, Python, it
should also be possible to run the source code, Encoding.py, on other
platforms that have a Python interpreter.
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Operation
The complete command-line syntax of Encoding is as follows:
Encoding.exe TaskName FileSpec SourceEncoding TargetEncoding
Some parameters are optional or not applicable depending on the name of
the task. Typing the .exe extension is optional. Capitalization does not
matter in task or encoding names . The following tasks are supported,
illustrated with example parameter values:
encoding help
provides a help summary. The help parameter is assumed if no other valid
task name is entered.
encoding default
provides the default language and encoding of the computer, e.g.,
en-us cp1252
which means U.S. English using code page 1252.
encoding show *.txt
provides the encoding of all files meeting the *.txt specification. If a
file has a Unicode byte order mark (BOM), the encoding can be exactly
determined. Otherwise, the encoding is huristically detected by analyzing
various factors. This is the same algorithm used by the Firefox web
browser to detect the encoding of text. It is usually correct, but not
always.
encoding convert *.txt utf-8b
converts all *.txt files to UTF-8 encoding with a BOM. Use utf-8n to get
utf-8 without a BOM, which is the norm on Linux and the Mac. For ease of
typing, the dash character (-) is optional, so utf8b or utf8n may be used
instead. Note that these are not official encoding names, but conventions
to help clarify whether utf-8 is being encoded with or without a BOM.
Some Windows programs prefer one, while others do not.
encode convert *.txt utf8n utf8b
converts *.txt files to UTF8 with a BOM. In this case, both a source and
target encoding are specified. Rather than detecting the source encoding,
it is treated as UTF-8 without a BOM.
If the word 'backup' rather than 'convert' is used for the task, the
original files will be backed up with the same names except for the
addition of a .bak extension.
encode url http://python.org
provides encoding information about the web page at that address.
Encoding references are sought in the server response headers and meta
data of the page. A conflict between encoding references is reported.
encoding bytes *.txt
provides a list of numeric byte values, one per line, for all files
matching the pattern. The first line is the file name. This is probably
most useful when analyzing a single source file, and when redirecting
standard output to another file that may be examined in an editor, e.g.,
encoding bytes test.txt >temp.txt
encoding chars temp.txt >test.txt
provides output in a similar form except that each line shows information
about a character rather than a byte (Unicode can represent a character
with multiple bytes). Each line has the Unicode name of the character,
its numeric code point, and an ASCII equivalent of the character if
available and different from the original character. For example, the
ellipses symbol has the code point U2026, and an ASCII equivalent of
three consecutive periods (...), so it would appear as
HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS 8230 ...
Add a SourceEncoding parameter to specify the file's encoding directly,
rather than auto-detect it.
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Development Notes
The Encoding utility is developed with the Python 2.5 language from
http://python.org
The following built-in packages are used: codecs, glob, locale, os,
shutil, sys, and unicodedata.
The following third-party packages are used:
chardet -- Universal encoding detector
http://chardet.feedparser.org
encutils -- Encoding detection collection for Python
http://cthedot.de/encutils/
py2exe -- Build standalone executables for Windows
http://py2exe.org
unidecode -- Unicode transliteration in Python
http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2009/01/unicode_transliteration_in_python/
The batch file, RunSetup.bat, runs the py2exe script, setup.py, to create
the stand-alone executable, Encoding.exe.
I welcome feedback, suggestions, and code contributions, which will help
this project improve over time.
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