Today we would like to answer the most frequent questions about file encodings in the IDE and show you a few tricks, which may help you to avoid potential pitfalls.
To be able to display the text correctly, IntelliJ IDEA needs to know which file encoding to use. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to tell the file encoding without additional information. Especially when single-byte encodings are used, there are multiple mappings possible.
However, things look better for UTF-family encodings. The UTF family consists of:
In particular, for an English character subset, the UTF-8 encoded file looks exactly like old plain ASCII text. That’s why UTF-8 is so popular and that’s why it’s the most preferred encoding.
IntelliJ IDEA uses multi-stage educated guessing, from most obvious to far-stretched.
First, if the BOM present, use the corresponding UTF-family encoding. Check if the file type declares the encoding itself and use that. For example, JSP files can specify the encoding right in the text:
Check if you have specified the encoding explicitly and use that. You can specify the desired encoding for the file or for the containing directory or for the whole project or for the IDE. IntelliJ IDEA will use the most specific encoding:
Try to figure out the encoding using some hints or heuristics. For example, when Auto-detect UTF-8 is selected, the IDE will analyze the file looking for some byte combinations which are UTF-8-specific.
Finally, use the project-level or, if the project is unavailable, the application-level encoding.
See Settings → File Encoding → Project Encoding → IDE Encoding.
If the file encodings are completely compatible for this text, e.g. when changing English characters text from US_ASCII to UTF-8, IntelliJ IDEA just silently re-assigns encoding.
However, if the encodings are sufficiently different, the IDE have to ask you:
Please note these little gray exclamation marks, meaning that that particular conversion/reload can cause information loss.
For example when you try to reload UTF-8 encoded file with the US-ASCII encoding, losing the non-english characters in the process.
Or when you try to save the German umlauts to the plain text ISO-8859-1 file.
IntelliJ IDEA will warn you when you try to swear in German in an ASCII-only document:
To enable this inspection, go to Settings → Inspections → Lossy Encoding.
Likewise, IntelliJ IDEA will try to detect the situation when you load rich-encoded text with incompatible encoding:
To avoid any problems with file encoding we strongly recommend to use UTF-8.
That’s all for today and we hope this article was useful for you!
Develop with Pleasure!
转载自:http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/03/use-the-utf-8-luke-file-encodings-in-intellij-idea/