Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Visual Sudio Encodings

UTF-8 is great. I like anything that takes the hassle out of thinking in regional characters and stuff.

But older software doesn't know about UTF-8... particularly Oracle SQLPlus.

When I added a sql script to my project, if I call sqlplus with it I receive a nice error:
"SP2-0734: comando desconhecido comeτado por "∩╗┐set ser..." - o resto da linha foi ignorado."

Even if you don't know portuguese, you can guess the error (not even the error message is printed right...)

The problem is the first 3 bytes of an UTF-8 file are EF BB BF, and SQLPlus doesn't like it...

For now, I don't have a solution, just a work-around: in Visual Studio, open the file with an external program (notepad to the rescue) and save it as ANSI.

Does anyone know how can I tell Visual Studio to save that particular file with a different encoding?