Encoding Options
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Purely curious about this one, when would I use the other encoding options in Notepad++? Everything I seem to find says that UTF-8 is the standard, and other code editors I’ve looked at don’t seem to even provide the option to encode in UCS or similar encoding forms. Is there something I’m missing, or is the option there purely for personal preference?
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UTF-8 is very common and usually great but it is not THE standard. Especially for non-English text for which it is rather inefficient.
So first reason to support multiple encodings is that if you need to open a file that is NOT UTF-8 Notepad++ need to realize that and use the correct encoding. it should also retain the original encoding (avoid converting it to UTF-8) unless the user requested it.
2nd reason is that sometimes you edit something that is used as an input for another application that expect specific encoding. Windows apps may like UCS-2. Localized apps around the world may like the encoding that is efficient for their symbols.
Nevertheless if you don’t require specific encoding utf-8 is the right default to use.
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That makes sense, thank you.