Word – Make WordPad properly open a UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded file

utf-8wordpad

When I try to open a file that has UTF-8 encoding, I get some junk characters. I don't see anywhere in the open dialog to specify the encoding for the file. I have seen various answers which talk about how to save as UTF-8 so Wordpad will properly recognize, however this file is from an external source and I didn't create it. How can I get WordPad to correctly recognize the encoding?

Update: I read somewhere that maybe WordPad only supports UTF-16, not UTF-8. I tried opening a file encoded in UTF-16 but when the file is opened, there is a space between every character and special characters still don't display correctly.

Best Answer

When I try to open a file that has UTF-8 encoding, I get some junk characters.

Your file needs to have a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning in order to specify the encoding.

Try writing a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file. Chr(255) followed by Chr(254) denotes little-endian 16 bit encoding.

FAQ - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 & BOM

Source Wordpad and Unicode

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