---- Original Message ------
From: Jamal Mazrui <[log in to unmask]
Subject: Announcing Encoding utility
Date sent: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:17:44 -0400 (EDT)

Now available at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/Encoding.zip

Encoding
Version 1.0
August 8, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Jamal Mazrui
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
----------

Contents

Description
Installation
Operation
Development Notes
----------

Description

Encoding is a free, open source, command-line utility for 
performing
encoding-related operations on files.  It can show the encoding 
of files,
and convert between different encodings.  Batch operations are 
supported
if wildcard characters are used in the file specification.  The
executable, Encoding.exe, should run on any version of Windows.  
The
source code, Encoding.py, should run on other platforms as well.

An encoding is an agreement about how to represent textual 
characters with
computer bytes.  Characters are encoded as byte sequences that 
may be
stored in disk files or computer memory.  A byte stream is 
decoded to
produce characters in a human language.  If a text file is not 
readable,
the reason may be that it has an encoding that was either not 
recognized
or not decoded properly.  This utility may help with such issues,
benefiting software developers or end users.  It works with over 
a hundred
character encodings.
----------

Installation

Unarchive Encoding.zip into a directory, e.g., into
C:\Encoding

Run Encoding.exe at a command prompt, e.g., one created by 
entering
cmd.exe

at the Windows Start/Run prompt.

Since Encoding is developed in a cross-platform language, Python, 
it
should also be possible to run the source code, Encoding.py, on 
other
platforms that have a Python interpreter.
----------

Operation

The complete command-line syntax of Encoding is as follows:

Encoding.exe TaskName FileSpec SourceEncoding TargetEncoding

Some parameters are optional or not applicable depending on the 
name of
the task.  Typing the .exe extension is optional.  Capitalization 
does not
matter in task or encoding names .  The following tasks are 
supported,
illustrated with example parameter values:

encoding help

provides a help summary.  The help parameter is assumed if no 
other valid
task name is entered.

encoding default

provides the default language and encoding of the computer, e.g.,
en-us cp1252

which means U.S.  English using code page 1252.

encoding show *.txt

provides the encoding of all files meeting the *.txt 
specification.  If a
file has a Unicode byte order mark (BOM), the encoding can be 
exactly
determined.  Otherwise, the encoding is huristically detected by 
analyzing
various factors.  This is the same algorithm used by the Firefox 
web
browser to detect the encoding of text.  It is usually correct, 
but not
always.

encoding convert *.txt utf-8b

converts all *.txt files to UTF-8 encoding with a BOM.  Use 
utf-8n to get
utf-8 without a BOM, which is the norm on Linux and the Mac.  For 
ease of
typing, the dash character (-) is optional, so utf8b or utf8n may 
be used
instead.  Note that these are not official encoding names, but 
conventions
to help clarify whether utf-8 is being encoded with or without a 
BOM.
Some Windows programs prefer one, while others do not.

encode convert *.txt utf8n utf8b

converts *.txt files to UTF8 with a BOM.  In this case, both a 
source and
target encoding are specified.  Rather than detecting the source 
encoding,
it is treated as UTF-8 without a BOM.

If the word 'backup' rather than 'convert' is used for the task, 
the
original files will be backed up with the same names except for 
the
addition of a .bak extension.

encode url http://python.org

provides encoding information about the web page at that address.
Encoding references are sought in the server response headers and 
meta
data of the page.  A conflict between encoding references is 
reported.

encoding bytes *.txt

provides a list of numeric byte values, one per line, for all 
files
matching the pattern.  The first line is the file name.  This is 
probably
most useful when analyzing a single source file, and when 
redirecting
standard output to another file that may be examined in an 
editor, e.g.,
encoding bytes test.txt >temp.txt

encoding chars temp.txt >test.txt

provides output in a similar form except that each line shows 
information
about a character rather than a byte (Unicode can represent a 
character
with multiple bytes).  Each line has the Unicode name of the 
character,
its numeric code point, and an ASCII equivalent of the character 
if
available and different from the original character.  For 
example, the
ellipses symbol  has the code point U2026, and an ASCII 
equivalent of
three consecutive periods (...), so it would appear as
HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS 8230 ...


Add a SourceEncoding parameter to specify the file's encoding 
directly,
rather than auto-detect it.
----------

Development Notes

The Encoding utility is developed with the Python 2.5 language 
from
http://python.org

The following built-in packages are used:  codecs, glob, locale, 
os,
shutil, sys, and unicodedata.

The following third-party packages are used:

chardet -- Universal encoding detector
http://chardet.feedparser.org

encutils -- Encoding detection collection for Python
http://cthedot.de/encutils/

py2exe -- Build standalone executables for Windows
http://py2exe.org

unidecode -- Unicode transliteration in Python
http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2009/01/unicode_transl
iteration_in_python/

The batch file, RunSetup.bat, runs the py2exe script, setup.py, 
to create
the stand-alone executable, Encoding.exe.

I welcome feedback, suggestions, and code contributions, which 
will help
this project improve over time.


    VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
    http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
    Signoff: [log in to unmask]
    Subscribe: [log in to unmask]