Retrieving properties of a text file

[Ray_Barber]

I would like to get the text encode property of a text file.

Right now I open the file in TextEdit, with UI-scripting I check the value on the File>SaveAs… sheet.

Is there a way to retrieve this as a property in the file that has been opened or the file itself?

virtualdc.

[Ray_Barber]

I’m not sure I understand the question, but you can get the ‘properties’ of a TextEdit doc with this script

tell application "TextEdit" to get properties of document frontmost

[Ray_Barber]

Thanks.

[julifos]

Teorically, you can’t guess the encoding of a file, but looking for some evidences:

tell application “TextEdit” to ¬
path of document frontmost as POSIX file

try
set firstBytes to read result for 50
on error
try
set firstBytes to read result for 2
on error
error “Unable to determine file encoding”
end try
end try

if firstBytes starts with “<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>” then
display dialog “Maybe a utf-8 encoded file”
else if firstBytes starts with ((ASCII character 239) & (ASCII character 187) & (ASCII character 191)) then
display dialog “Maybe a utf-8 encoded file”
else if firstBytes starts with ((ASCII character 254) & (ASCII character 255)) then
display dialog “Maybe a Big Endian utf-16 file”
else if firstBytes starts with ((ASCII character 255) & (ASCII character 254)) then
display dialog “Maybe a Little Endian utf-16 file”
else if firstBytes starts with “{\rtf” then
display dialog “Maybe a RTF file”
else
display dialog “I don’t know the encoding of this file”
end if

If you see the “I don’t know the encoding…”, as far as I know, you can’t determine the encoding of the file. If such file contains a number “8”, it is a simple ascii file, and could be interpreted as corean, win, mac, utf-8… Perhaps you can check in some place if the file was expressly opened as corean (perhaps in TextEdit’s preference file?)
Please, note that this code is only a sample, you may find a “rtfd” file, and it will break in the second line (you can’t “read” a package), and you may also add lots of formats to check for…