Detenc is a small utility program that helps in finding out what kind of encoding a file has. Detenc makes it possible to visually step through any number of encodings, and, by looking at the rendering on the screen, determine when the right encoding has been found.

Detenc enables the determination of a text file encoding using visual inspection. Select or drop a file and select your best-guess for the text file's character encoding. Visually verify that the encoding is properly rendered,oryou can simply try other encodings until the proper one is selected.

To quickly cycle through the various possibilities, use the scroll-wheel on your mouse if you have one, or select the individual encoding one-by-one.