PrestoSoft Blog: ExamDiff Pro 17: Support for Comparing ANSI Files with Non-Default Encodings

ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce the ability to manually specify the codepage (encoding) used for non-Unicode text files.

By default, when ExamDiff Pro loads an 8-bit-encoded (non-Unicode) text file, it interprets the file based on the system codepage, as determined by your default language setting in Windows. This usually does the right thing, but causes problems if you routinely have to deal with non-Unicode text files in different encodings. For example, here's what it looks like if you try to load some files in the Shift-JIS encoding (popular for Japanese scripts) while your Windows language is set to "English (U.S.)":

As you can see, there is some gibberish in the Added blocks here, where we would expect to see Japanese text.

ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces a solution to this issue: in Options under Text Comparison | Advanced, you now have the ability to override the codepage used for non-Unicode files, with the ability to choose any of the Windows codepages.

So we can set the Custom codepage to "932 (ANSI/OEM - Japanese Shift-JIS)":

And after re-comparing, the Japanese text in these files appears properly: