Environment > Miscellaneous Environment Topics > Character Encoding

# Character Encoding

Character Encoding governs which specific bytes are used to represent individual characters stored in a file. There are many different character encodings in common use; usage varies depending on location (different encodings may be used to represent different character sets, such as Latin or Cyrillic), computer platform, or age of the computer or software used to write files.

The IDL Workbench uses the UTF-8 character encoding by default. UTF-8 is a modern encoding designed to allow the representation of many different types of characters, and is widely supported by operating systems and applications. The fact that the IDL Workbench uses the UTF-8 encoding as its default means that if you open a file written using a different encoding, some characters may not appear correctly.

To change the default character encoding used by the IDL Workbench:

1. Select Window > Preferences.
2. In the Preferences dialog, click the + next to General to expand the list of pages, then select Workspace.
3. In the Text file encoding section, select a new encoding from the Other dropdown list.

To change the character encoding used for a single file:

1. Ensure that the file is included in an IDL Workbench project.
2. Select the file name in the Project Explorer view.
3. Select File > Properties.
4. In the Text file encoding section, select a new encoding from the Other dropdown list.

If a file does not appear correctly when using the UTF-8 encoding and you do not know which encoding was used to create the file, you may need to try several other encodings before finding a match. The ISO-8859-1 encoding is perhaps the most common non-UTF encoding; if the file was created on a Windows system, you can also try the Windows-1252 encoding.