Mass convert a project to UTF-8 using Notepad++

Lately, I had to convert the encoding of a multimodule maven project from our default Cp-1252 encoding to UTF-8. Changing the project settings is rather easy and there are multiple guides availble on the internet, so I won’t re-invent the hot water.

The most dificult task however was converting all our source files from Cp-1252 to UTF-8 and preferably on Windows 🙂 . I’ve been looking into applications that would auto-convert everything for me, but none of them actually converted to content, resulting in garbage files. I almost started converting all the files by hand using Notepad++ when I discovered this process could be automated !

First of all you’ll need to install the Python Script plugin using the Notepad++ Plugin Manager.Download the Python Script plugin from SourceForge. I’ve had some issues with the version that currently ships through the PluginManager so it’s best to get this version. Then, after installing and restarting Notepad++, you have to create a new script with the following code:

import os;
import sys;
filePathSrc="C:\\Temp\\UTF8"
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(filePathSrc):
	for fn in files:
	  if fn[-4:] != '.jar' and fn[-5:] != '.ear' and fn[-4:] != '.gif' and fn[-4:] != '.jpg' and fn[-5:] != '.jpeg' and fn[-4:] != '.xls' and fn[-4:] != '.GIF' and fn[-4:] != '.JPG' and fn[-5:] != '.JPEG' and fn[-4:] != '.XLS' and fn[-4:] != '.PNG' and fn[-4:] != '.png' and fn[-4:] != '.cab' and fn[-4:] != '.CAB' and fn[-4:] != '.ico':
		notepad.open(root + "\\" + fn)
		console.write(root + "\\" + fn + "\r\n")
		notepad.runMenuCommand("Encoding", "Convert to UTF-8 without BOM")
		notepad.save()
		notepad.close()

I think the code speaks for itself, just be 100% sure that you do the conversion to UTF-8 without the UTF-8 byte order mark (BOM) since javac does not support this special character.

If you have problems running the script, then first open the console (Plugins > Python Script > Show Console). Chances are that the indents got messed up (for those who don’t know Python, it doesn’t use curly brackets to identify a code block, it uses correct indentation instead).

//Update 20/07/2017:
This post is still attracting a lot of attention and for some people things work fine and for some it doesn’t. I would strongly advise to read through the comments in case you have a problem. I just re-tested the script on my laptop with Windows 8, Notepad++ 7.4.2 and PythonScript 1.0.8 and it works like a charm.