How can I make all these letters appear correctly?
You have two options :
- Convert the file to UTF-8. – This is what I recommend.
- Configure VS Code to auto-detect the most proper encoding.
The second option is preferable if you never want to change the encoding of any files.
Option 1. Convert the file to UTF-8
The acronym ANSI stands for American National Standards Institute
The problem with ANSI encoding is that – although a standard – it's
conditional on what natural language your text is written in.
In the case of Swedish/Scandinavian, or even all Western European
(Latin) languages, "ANSI" means Windows-1252
.
1
1a. Make VS Code use the correct encoding
So, in VS Code, instead of looking for ANSI encoding, you should look for Windows-1252.
If you don't want to change the encoding, you're now all set and done.
Otherwise, it now remains to convert the file to UTF-8 encoding.
1b. Convert to UTF-8
The status bar now displays Windows 1252 instead of UTF-8.
Click on Windows 1252 and then on Save with Encoding :
Now click on UTF-8. This converts the file's encoding to UTF-8 :
Option 2. Configure VS Code to auto-detect the encoding
If you don't want to convert to UTF-8, and if you experience this problem over and over again – every time you open another file, you may prefer to have VS Code always auto-guess the encoding.
To achieve this, you need to enable the Auto Guess Encoding
feature of VS Code.
Press Ctrl+, and paste or type
autoGuessEncoding
.
2
Check the box where it says :
"When enabled, the editor will attempt to guess the character set
encoding when opening files.
This setting can also be configured per language.
Note, this setting is not respected by text search.
Only Files: Encoding is respected."
3. A table showing ANSI encoding → language/alphabet
ANSI encoding | Language/Alphabet |
---|---|
Windows-1250 | Slavic languages – Latin alphabet (e.g. Polish) |
Windows-1251 | Slavic languages – Cyrillic alphabet (e.g. Ukrainian) |
Windows-1252 | Western European languages (Afrikaans, French, German, Scandinavian, Spanish, Swahili …) |
Windows-1253 | Greek |
Windows-1254 | Turkish, Latin Azeri and Uzbek |
Windows-1255 | Hebrew |
Windows-1256 | Arabic, Farsi, Urdu |
Windows-1257 | Baltic languages: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian |
Windows-1258 | Vietnamese |
References
- "ANSI" stands for American National Standards Institute
- ANSI codes listed by language
- ANSI Character Sets
- Microsoft official encoding information
- The default settings in VS Code
1 For a comprehensive list of what "ANSI" means, see the table in Section 3.
2 On macOS, press ⌘ instead of Ctrl. I honestly don't know how helpful this answer is to macOS users.