UCS-2 encoding option missing

Alexis Guerin

For some reasons the encoding option in UCS-2 are missing and I need to convert a txt file in UCS-2 LE BOM.

PeterJones

UCS-2 is a subset of what became the official UTF-16 spec – it has everything that UTF-16 does except for being able to go beyond the BMP: in other words, UTF-16 has more characters available than UCS-2.

So if you think you find yourself wanting UCS-2, then what you really want to use is UTF-16, which is what Notepad++ supports. (And most software that claims to want UCS-2 will actually accept any valid UTF-16, because they don’t understand the difference between the two terms and they use the older name even though they’ve implemented the full UTF-16 standard. Even Notepad++ used to call those modes “UCS-2”, until someone pointed out that Notepad++ was using the wrong name for what was implemented.)

So if you want UCS-2 LE, then use UTF-16 LE.

Alexis Guerin

@PeterJones

Thanks for your answer.