Save all files in Visual Studio project as UTF-8

Question

I wonder if it's possible to save all files in a Visual Studio 2008 project into a specific character encoding. I got a solution with mixed encodings and I want to make them all the same (UTF-8 with signature).

I know how to save single files, but how about all files in a project?

Answer 1

I'm only offering this suggestion in case there's no way to automatically do this in Visual Studio (I'm not even sure this would work):

1. Create a class in your project named 足の不自由なハッキング (or some other unicode text that will force Visual Studio to encode as UTF-8).
2. Add "using MyProject.足の不自由なハッキング;" to the top of each file. You should be able to do it on everything by doing a global replace of "using System.Text;" with "using System.Text;using MyProject.足の不自由なハッキング;".
3. Save everything. You may get a long string of "Do you want to save X.cs using UTF-8?" messages or something.

Answer 2

I would convert the files programmatically (outside VS), e.g. using a Python script:

import glob, codecs

for f in glob.glob("*.py"):
    data = open("f", "rb").read()
    if data.startswith(codecs.BOM_UTF8):
        # Already UTF-8
        continue
    # else assume ANSI code page
    data = data.decode("mbcs")
    data = codecs.BOM_UTF8 + data.encode("utf-8")
    open("f", "wb").write(data)

This assumes all files not in "UTF-8 with signature" are in the ANSI code page - this is the same what VS 2008 apparently also assumes. If you know that some files have yet different encodings, you would have to specify what these encodings are.

Answer 3

Since you're already in Visual Studio, why not just simply write the code?

foreach (var f in new DirectoryInfo(@"...").GetFiles("*.cs", SearchOption.AllDirectories)) {
  string s = File.ReadAllText(f.FullName);
  File.WriteAllText (f.FullName, s, Encoding.UTF8);
}

Only three lines of code! I'm sure you can write this in less than a minute :-)

Answer 4

In case you need to do this in PowerShell, here is my little move:

Function Write-Utf8([string] $path, [string] $filter='*.*')
{
    [IO.SearchOption] $option = [IO.SearchOption]::AllDirectories;
    [String[]] $files = [IO.Directory]::GetFiles($path, $filter, $option);
    foreach($file in $files)
    {
     "Writing $file...";
     [String]$s = [IO.File]::ReadAllText($file);
     [IO.File]::WriteAllText($file, $s, [Text.Encoding]::UTF8);
    }
}

Answer 5

Thanks for your solutions, this code has worked for me :

    Dim s As String = ""
    Dim direc As DirectoryInfo = New DirectoryInfo("Your Directory path")

    For Each fi As FileInfo In direc.GetFiles("*.vb", SearchOption.AllDirectories)
        s = File.ReadAllText(fi.FullName, System.Text.Encoding.Default)
        File.WriteAllText(fi.FullName, s, System.Text.Encoding.Unicode)
    Next

Answer 6

This may be of some help.

http://code-journey.com/2008/12/22/visual-studio-2008-text-file-encoding-problems/

Short version: edit one file, select File -> Advanced Save Options. Instead of changing UTF-8 to Ascii, change it to UTF-8.

Set code page & hit ok. It seems to persist just past the current file.