Linux & OSX: Get file encoding

Sometime you need to know what’s your file encoding? Is it UTF-8, ISO 8859-1, ASCII or Windows 1252? You can find this out by using the file Unix command. Linux: file -i <filename> Mac OSX: file -I <filename> Example usage:

username@server ~$ file -i somefile.php
somefile.php: text/x-php; charset=us-ascii
username@server ~$ file -i myutf8file.txt
myutf8file.txt: text/plain; charset=utf-8
username@server ~$ file -i username.tar.bz2
username.tar.bz2: application/x-bzip2; charset=binary
username@server ~$

If you want only the encoding. You can do file -i filename.txt | sed "s/.*charset=\(.*\)/\1/" E.g.

username@server ~$ file -i myutf8file.txt | sed "s/.\*charset=\\(.\*\\)/\\1/"
utf-8