Change encoding of a text file programmatically

[DanRathbun]

@DanRathbun

Try something like …

      def transcode_to_utf8(oldfilepath, newfilepath)
        # Read 20 bytes of the file and get the encoding:
        encoding = IO.read(oldfilepath, 20).encoding

Well I did not have any luck with that. And doing a search, I found that others before also tried that.

See In Ruby, how to reliably detect a file's encoding (including UTF-16 without BOM)? - Stack Overflow where a responder makes the case that any attempt to “sniff” a text file encoding is unreliable.

Another question (Determining encoding for a file in Ruby - Stack Overflow) had a response about a Ruby gem “rchardet19” with which I also had not very good results. To install this gem from SketchUp’s console, … type:

Gem::install "rchardet19"

After you see all the gem specification spit out, type:

require "rchardet19"

… and lastly:

defined? CharDet

If it is defined the response will be "constant".

You can read the gem’s README to know how it works:

GitHub - oleander/rchardet: Character encoding auto-detection. Ruby 1.9...