Save all files in Visual Studio project as UTF-8

I wonder if it's possible to save all files in a Visual Studio 2008 project into a specific character encoding. I got a solution with mixed encodings and I want to make them all the same (UTF-8 with signature).

I know how to save single files, but how about all files in a project?

Since you're already in Visual Studio, why not just simply write the code?

foreach (var f in new DirectoryInfo(@"...").GetFiles("*.cs", SearchOption.AllDirectories)) {
  string s = File.ReadAllText(f.FullName);
  File.WriteAllText (f.FullName, s, Encoding.UTF8);
}

Only three lines of code! I'm sure you can write this in less than a minute :-)

This may be of some help.

link removed due to original reference being defaced by spam site.

Short version: edit one file, select File -> Advanced Save Options. Instead of changing UTF-8 to Ascii, change it to UTF-8. Edit: Make sure you select the option that says no byte-order-marker (BOM)

Set code page & hit ok. It seems to persist just past the current file.

In case you need to do this in PowerShell, here is my little move:

Function Write-Utf8([string] $path, [string] $filter='*.*')
{
    [IO.SearchOption] $option = [IO.SearchOption]::AllDirectories;
    [String[]] $files = [IO.Directory]::GetFiles((Get-Item $path).FullName, $filter, $option);
    foreach($file in $files)
    {
        "Writing $file...";
        [String]$s = [IO.File]::ReadAllText($file);
        [IO.File]::WriteAllText($file, $s, [Text.Encoding]::UTF8);
    }
}

I would convert the files programmatically (outside VS), e.g. using a Python script:

import glob, codecs

for f in glob.glob("*.py"):
    data = open("f", "rb").read()
    if data.startswith(codecs.BOM_UTF8):
        # Already UTF-8
        continue
    # else assume ANSI code page
    data = data.decode("mbcs")
    data = codecs.BOM_UTF8 + data.encode("utf-8")
    open("f", "wb").write(data)

This assumes all files not in "UTF-8 with signature" are in the ANSI code page - this is the same what VS 2008 apparently also assumes. If you know that some files have yet different encodings, you would have to specify what these encodings are.

Using C#:
1) Create a new ConsoleApplication, then install Mozilla Universal Charset Detector
2) Run code:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    const string targetEncoding = "utf-8";
    foreach (var f in new DirectoryInfo(@"<your project's path>").GetFiles("*.cs", SearchOption.AllDirectories))
    {
        var fileEnc = GetEncoding(f.FullName);
        if (fileEnc != null && !string.Equals(fileEnc, targetEncoding, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
        {
            var str = File.ReadAllText(f.FullName, Encoding.GetEncoding(fileEnc));
            File.WriteAllText(f.FullName, str, Encoding.GetEncoding(targetEncoding));
        }
    }
    Console.WriteLine("Done.");
    Console.ReadKey();
}

private static string GetEncoding(string filename)
{
    using (var fs = File.OpenRead(filename))
    {
        var cdet = new Ude.CharsetDetector();
        cdet.Feed(fs);
        cdet.DataEnd();
        if (cdet.Charset != null)
            Console.WriteLine("Charset: {0}, confidence: {1} : " + filename, cdet.Charset, cdet.Confidence);
        else
            Console.WriteLine("Detection failed: " + filename);
        return cdet.Charset;
    }
}