ENCGUESS(1perl)

💖 NAME 💖

okay so bestie, gather round — encguess is the tool that guesses character encodings of files. that's it, that's the whole job, and it eats every single time 👑

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✨ VERSION ✨

this is the version string, copied exactly because we do NOT play with provenance:

$Id: encguess,v 0.4 2023/11/10 01:10:50 dankogai Exp $

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

the whole vibe in one line:

encguess [switches] filename...

like. give it some files, it tells you what encoding they're in. screaming, crying, throwing up, etc 💅

🎀 SWITCHES 🎀

• -h — show this message and exit. that's it, that's the help. bye 👋
• -s — specify a list of "suspect encoding types" to test. separate them with either : or , — your call, icon status on both 🫶
• -S — output a list of all acceptable encoding types that can be used with the -s param. so like, if you don't know what to suspect, ask this first 💀
• -u — suppress display of unidentified types. when a file is giving mystery, this keeps the mystery to itself 🙈

🌈 EXAMPLES: 🌈

• guess the encoding of a file named test.txt, using only the default suspect types:

encguess test.txt

• guess the encoding type of a file named test.txt, using the suspect types euc-jp,shiftjis,7bit-jis:

encguess -s euc-jp,shiftjis,7bit-jis test.txt
encguess -s euc-jp:shiftjis:7bit-jis test.txt

• guess the encoding type of several files, and do NOT display results for unidentified files:

encguess -us euc-jp,shiftjis,7bit-jis test*.txt

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so the way this works, bestie — the encoding identification is done by checking one encoding type at a time until all but the right type are eliminated. it's giving elimination round ✨ it's giving reality TV for encodings ✨

the set of encoding types it tries is defined by the -s parameter, and by default that's ascii, utf8, and UTF-16/32 with BOM. you can override that default by passing one or more encoding types via the -s parameter.

okay and this next part matters, don't skip it 🙏 if you need to pass in multiple suspect encoding types, use a quoted string with a space separating each value.

(yes yes, quoted string, spaces between the values — not commas, not colons, for that particular move. the -s flag itself still takes : or , for the list. iykwyk 💅)

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• Encode::Guess
• Encode::Detect

both iconic, both worth a look 🫶

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🍓 LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT 🍓

Copyright 2015 Michael LaGrasta and Dan Kogai.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License (2.0). You may obtain a copy of the full license at:

<http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0>

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and that's the page, bestie — written against perl v5.44.0, dated 2026-10-17, filed under ENCGUESS(1perl). no cap, that's the whole manual. go guess some encodings 💖✨