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I am having some trouble with some text documents and I am pretty sure the problem is to do with character encoding

I am doing things like replacing spaces with commas or tabs with spaces and on most text files I have no problem but on some of the text files the same syntax either does nothing or has unpredicatbel effects

I know that some of the documents I am working on were created in other countries (a variety of European ones mostly) and I suspect that some may even have been originally produced on an Apple. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing where each file was originally created

Obviously this is the kind of thing that the character encoding option in WildEdit is intended to address.

So my question is this: how can I find out what the character encoding of a text file is?

(the WildEdit help warns you of the dire consequences possible if you use the wrong character encoding without giving any clues as to how to find out the right character encoding!!!)

Why do you suppose that the problem has to do with character encoding? Plain spaces, tabs and commas are the same in all encodings. Might the problem be to do with line endings?

You haven't provided much information. What regular expressions are you using? Which options are you using? What are the unpredictable effects that you mention?

Only you can determine the encoding of a file; TextPad has no idea what your files are supposed to look like or even which language they're in. You can load them with different encodings until they look right.