Saving Files in "Unicode Big Endian" Option

<< Using Notepad as a Unicode Text Editor

<< Unicode Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Notes

This section provides a tutorial example on how to save text files with Nodepad by selecting the 'Unicode big endian' encoding option on the save file dialog box.

In the next test, I want to try the save function with the "Unicode big endian" encoding.

1. Run Notepad and open hello.utf-8 correctly with the UTF-8 encoding option selected.

2. Click the File > "Save As" menu. The "Save As" dialog box comes up.

3. Enter notepad_utf-16be as the new file name and select "Unicode big endian" option in the Encoding field.

4. Click the Save button. Notepad saves the text to a new file named as: notepad_utf-16be.txt.

5. To see how my text is saved by Notepad, I need to run my HEX dump program on notepad_utf-16be.txt:

C:\herong\unicode>java HexWriter notepad_utf-16be.txt
   notepad_utf-16be.hex

Number of input bytes: 170

C:\herong\unicode>type notepad_utf-16be.hex
FEFF00480065006C006C006F00200063
006F006D007000750074006500720021
0020002D00200045006E0067006C0069
00730068000D000A753581114F60597D
FF010020002D002000530069006D0070
006C0069006600690065006400200043
00680069006E006500730065000D000A
96FB81664F60597DFE570020002D0020
0054007200610064006900740069006F
006E0061006C0020004300680069006E
006500730065000D000A

Very nice. This is a perfect UTF-16 encoding file using the Big-Endian with BOM format. Those leading 2 bytes represent the BOM flag, which is not part of the text.

Conclusion - The "Unicode big endian" encoding option of Notepad matches the "Big-Endian with BOM" format of Unicode UTF-16 encoding.

Sections in This Chapter

What Is Notepad?

Opening UTF-8 Text Files

Opening UTF-16BE Text Files

Opening UTF-16LE Text Files

Saving Files in UTF-8 Option

Byte Order Mark (BOM) - FEFF - EFBBBF

Saving Files in "Unicode Big Endian" Option

Saving Files in "Unicode" Option

Supported Save and Open File Formats