Does a file on windows have an encoding attribute?

I have been rea开发者_如何学Cding about the issue with trying to figure out the actual encoding of a file and all its complications. But I just need to know what the encoding of a file was set to when it was saved. Does windows store this information somewhere similar to file type , date modified etc., ?

---

That's not available. The Windows file system (NTFS) doesn't store any metadata for a file beyond the trivial stuff like name, extension, last written date, etcetera. Nothing that's specific for the file type.

All you have available is the BOM, bytes at beginning of the file that indicate the UTF encoding and byte order. It only exists for files encoded in UTF and, unfortunately, is optional. The real troublemakers however are text files that were encoded with a particular 8-bit non-Unicode code page. Usually created by a legacy application. Nothing you can do for that but hope that the file wasn't created too far away from your machine so that the default system code page is a match.

---

No operating system stores the information about the encoding to a file. the encoding is a property of text file only. Since some text files do not have .txt extension and some .txt file is not really a text file, associating the encoding to a file does not make much sense.

Some UTF-8 files store the byte order mark (BOM) at the beginning of the file which can be used to check whether it is a UTF-8 file or not. However, BOM is not always present and a UTF-8 file does not need to have BOM. So the only way to determine the encoding of the text file is to open it up with different encoding method until you can read the file.