Dialog box: Choose encoding
With this dialog box you can choose the encoding of the left and right file, respectively, e.g. when they were not detected automatically. This only works as long as the file hasn't been modified yet.
ANSI (plain text) The files contain plain text. The chosen font determines the encoding of the text.
Unicode (UTF-16) This option is for a Unicode file in UTF-16 format. This format uses 2 bytes per character, rarely 4 bytes. Normally UTF-16 files start with a so-called byte order mark (BOM), which allows for automatic detection of UTF-16. The BOM is FF FE (hexadecimal).
Unicode (MacOS) MacOS uses a different encoding of UTF-16-Unicode, where the odd and even bytes are swapped. You can switch to this encoding here if the BOM is missing. The BOM is FE FF (hexadecimal).
UTF-8 Also a Unicode encoding, but which uses between 1 and 4 bytes per character. The digits 0-9 and the upper- and lowercase Latin characters (no accents) use just one byte. UTF-8 can also usually be detected by the BOM at the beginning. The BOM for UTF-8 is EF BB BF (hexadecimal). HTML, XML and CSS files encoded with UTF-8 are detected automatically by the right header.
OK Closes the dialog box and switches to the chosen encoding.
Cancel Closes the dialog box without any changes.
Help Opens this help dialog