You will need
  • - Microsoft Office Word;
  • - KWrite;
  • - Mozilla Firefox;
  • - enca.
Instruction
1
Use the editor of Microsoft Office Word if it is installed on the computer to determine the encoding of a text file. To run this application. In the main menu, click "File" and "Open..." or press Ctrl+O. In the open dialog navigate to the desired directory and select the file. Click "Open". If the text encoding is different from CP1251, will automatically open the dialog "Convert file". Activate it in the option "Other" and choose the encoding using the list on the right. When you select the correct encoding in the "Sample" field will be displayed readable text.
2
Apply text editors, allowing for the encoding of the source text. A good example of such an application is KWrite (running KDE on UNIX-like systems). Load the text file into the editor. Then just iterate over the encodings until you see readable text (in KWrite is used for this section of the Encoding Tools menu).
3
Similarly a text editor to determine the file encoding you can use the browser. Use Mozilla Firefox. To run this application. If it is not installed, download the appropriate distribution from the site mozilla.org and install it. Open a browser to the text file. To do this, select in the main menu "File" and "Open file..." or press Ctrl+O. If the loaded text is displayed correctly, expand the "Encoding" of menu "View" and find out the encoding from the name of the item that has the mark. Otherwise choose this option by selecting the various items in the same menu, as well as his section "More".
4
Apply specialized tools to determine the encodings of text files. In UNIX-like systems you can use enca. If necessary install this software using package managers. Print the list of available languages by running the command:

enca --list languages

Determine encoding of a text file, specifying its name with the option -g and the language of the document using the option-L. for Example:

enca -L russian -g /home/vic/tmp/aaa.txt.