Saving Files in "Unicode (UTF-8)" Option

This section provides a tutorial example on how to save text files with Nodepad by selecting the 'Unicode (UTF-8)' encoding option on the file conversion dialog box.

After testing the Word open function, now I want to test the save function with the "Unicode (UTF-8)" option.

1. Run Word and open hello.utf-8 correctly with the Unicode (UTF-8) encoding option selected.

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

3. Enter word_utf-8.txt as the new file name and select the "Plain Text (*.txt)" option in the "Save as Type" field. See the picture below:

Word Save Text File
Word Save Text File

4. Click the Save button. The File Conversion dialog box comes up.

5. Click the "Other encoding" radio button and select the "Unicode (UTF-8)" option.

6. Click the OK button. Word saves the text to a new file named as: word_utf-8.txt.

7. To see how my text is saved by Word, I need to run my HEX dump program on word_utf-8.txt:

C:\herong\unicode>java HexWriter word_utf-8.txt word_utf-8.hex
Number of input bytes: 107

C:\herong\unicode>type word_utf-8.hex
EFBBBF48656C6C6F20636F6D70757465
7221202D20456E676C6973680D0AE794
B5E88491E4BDA0E5A5BDEFBC81202D20
53696D706C6966696564204368696E65
73650D0AE99BBBE885A6E4BDA0E5A5BD
EFB997202D20547261646974696F6E61
6C204368696E6573650D0A

The UTF-8 text file saved by Word is identical to my original UTF-8 text file except for those 3 bytes in the beginning, "EFBBBF". If we ignore "EFBBBF", we can say that Word saves UTF-8 text file correctly.

Of course, we know why Word prepends "EFBBBF" to the text file. "EFBBBF" is the UTF-8 sequence of the BOM character U+FEFF". See the previous chapter for more information.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Character Sets and Encodings

 ASCII Character Set and Encoding

 GB2312 Character Set and Encoding

 GB18030 Character Set and Encoding

 JIS X0208 Character Set and Encodings

 Unicode Character Set

 UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8-Bit)

 UTF-16, UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE Encodings

 UTF-32, UTF-32BE and UTF-32LE Encodings

 Python Language and Unicode Characters

 Java Language and Unicode Characters

 Character Encoding in Java

 Character Set Encoding Maps

 Encoding Conversion Programs for Encoded Text Files

 Using Notepad as a Unicode Text Editor

Using Microsoft Word as a Unicode Text Editor

 What Is Microsoft Word

 Opening UTF-8 Text Files

 Opening UTF-16BE Text Files

 Opening UTF-16LE Text Files

Saving Files in "Unicode (UTF-8)" Option

 Saving Files in "Unicode (Big-Endian)" Option

 Saving Files in Unicode Option

 Supported Save and Open File Formats

 Using Microsoft Excel as a Unicode Text Editor

 Unicode Fonts

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB