Opening Files
When Notepad opens a file it attempts to determine the encoding using an algorithm. The following chart lists test results observed when opening files with various encodings.
| Encoding | Byte Order Mark | Test Data | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| cp850 | abc-àèìòù© | Fail | |
| windows-1252 | abc-àèìòù© | Pass | |
| UTF-8 | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | |
| UTF-8 | UTF-8 BOM | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass |
| UTF-16LE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | |
| UTF-16 | LE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass |
| UTF-16BE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass | |
| UTF-16 | BE | abc-àèìòù©-뮻뮼뮽 | Pass |
Note that a bug in the algorithm causes some files containing certain patterns of characters to be incorrectly opened as UTF-16 files (see Notepad (Windows) Unicode detection).
Saving New Files
By default files created from Notepad are saved using the system's current ANSI code page. However files can be saved in other encodings by changing the "Encoding:" field of the "Save As" dialog.
The four choices listed map to these standard encoding names.
| Windows Encoding Name |
Standard Encoding Name |
Byte Order Mark |
|---|---|---|
| ANSI |
active ANSI code page | none |
| Unicode |
UTF-16 |
LE |
| Unicode big endian |
UTF-16 |
BE |
| UTF-8 |
UTF-8 |
UTF-8 |
Files saved with encodings other than ANSI will have a
Byte Order Mark (BOM)
added to the beginning of the file. According to the Unicode standard a BOM is
optional in UTF-8 files.
However, some programs only expect UTF-8 files with no BOM.
When such programs open a UTF-8 file that includes a BOM
they may incorrectly display the BOM as these three printable
characters: .