auto_ef

- auto encoding finder

Synopsis

/usr/bin/auto_ef [-e encoding_list] [-a] [-l level] 
     [file ...]

/usr/bin/auto_ef -h

Description

The auto_ef utility identifies the encoding of a given file. The utility judges the encoding by using the iconv code conversion, determining whether a certain code conversion was successful with the file, and also by performing frequency analyses on the character sequences that appear in the file.

The auto_ef utility might produce unexpected output if the string is binary, a character table, a localized digit list, or a chronogram, or if the string or file is very small in size (for example, less than one 100 bytes).

ASCII

ISO-2022-JP

JIS

eucJP

Japanese EUC

PCK

Japanese PC Kanji, CP932, Shift JIS

UTF-8

ko_KR.euc

Korean EUC

ko_KR.cp949

Unified Hangul

ISO-2022-KR

ISO-2022 Korean

zh_CN.iso2022-CN

ISO-2022 CN/CN-EXT

zh_CN.euc

Simplified Chinese EUC, GB2312

GB18030

Simplified Chinese GB18030/GBK

zh_TW-big5

BIG5

zh_TW-euc

Traditional Chinese EUC

zh_TW.hkscs

Hong Kong BIG5

iso-8859-1

West European, and similar

iso-8859-2

East European, and similar

iso-8859-5

Cyrillic, and similar

iso-8859-6

Arabic

iso-8859-7

Greek

iso-8859-8

Hebrew

CP1250

windows-1250, corresponding to ISO-8859-2

CP1251

windows-1251, corresponding to ISO-8859-5

CP1252

windows-1252, corresponding to ISO-8859-1

CP1253

windows-1253, corresponding to ISO-8859-7

CP1255

windows-1255, corresponding to ISO-8859-8

koi8-r

corresponding to iso-8859-5

By default, auto_ef returns a single, most likely encoding for text in a specified file. To get all possible encodings for the file, use the -a option.

Also by default, auto_ef uses the fastest process to examine the file. For more accurate results, use the -l option.

To examine data with a limited set of encodings, use the -e option.

Options

The following options are supported:

-a

Shows all possible encodings in order of possibility, with scores in the range between 0.0 and 1.0. A higher score means a higher possibility. For example,

example% auto_ef -a test_file
eucJP           0.89
zh_CN.euc       0.04
ko_KR.euc       0.01

Without this option, only one encoding with the highest score is shown.

-e encoding_list

Examines data only with specified encodings. For example, when encoding_list is specified as "ko_KR.euc:ko_KR.cp949", auto_ef examines text only with CP949 and ko_KR.euc. Without this option, auto_ef examines text with all encodings. Multiple encodings can be specified by separating the encodings using a colon (:).

-h

Shows the usage message.

-l level

Specifies the level of judgment. The value of level can be 0, 1, 2, or 3. Level 3 produces the best result but can be slow. Level 0 is fastest but results can be less accurate than in higher levels. The default is level 0.

Operands

The following operands are supported:

file

File name to examine.

Examples

Example 1 Examining encoding of a file

example% auto_ef file_name

Example 2 Examining encoding of a file at level 2.

example% auto_ef -l 2 file_name

Example 3 Examining encoding of a file with only eucJP or ko_KR.euc

example% auto_ef -e "eucJP:ko_KR.euc" file_name

Exit Status

The following exit values are returned:

0

Successful completion

1

An error occurred.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

Interface Stability of output format, when option -a is specified, is Evolving. Other interfaces are Stable.

See Also

auto_ef(3EXT), libauto_ef(3LIB), attributes(5)

International Language Environments Guide