Prelude (skip):
I had another one of those “utilicous” moments again.
I ran into a familiar problem that I’ve met before:
I had a site written in ANSI encoding (default behavior by Visual Studio BTW) , with some localized Hebrew content. The default settings if the web site in IIS were indeed ANSI for reading the files, and UTF-8 for displaying the files.
Peaches, everything was working fine..
Then I had to move the site to a different server..
Suddenly my site looked like a wingdings party.
The new server had different regional settings, and UTF-8 as the default for reading files.
I soon realized I had to go over the entire site, saving all files to UTF-8
(Yes, a better practice would have been to do so from the beginning, and override the default file encoding in the web.config).
Suddenly the “utilicous” feeling was all over me again, Time for a utility!
Thus the Convert Encoding Utility Was Born…
Ok, so I got the idea for what was needed, a small WinForm application that’ll choose a root folder, and perhaps even file extensions to modify.
After finishing the WinForm, I got that “hmm this could be useful for others” feeling.
After some refactoring, and I separated the solution to 3 projects:
Base library
Exposes methods that alter the file encoding either of a single
file, or of a folder (with the possibility to filter by file extensions)
Wiki Download (Entire solution)
Console application
Uses the library above. Can get command line arguments such as
single file to modify or a root directory (with the possibility to filter by file extensions)
WinForm application
Same as the console, but with UI
If you have any problems with the utilities, code or the documentation, please report it at Issues section
Enjoy,
Erik