file encoding on a mac, charset=binary

Question

I typed in

file -I*

to look at all the encoding of all the CSV files in an entire directory. A lot of the file encodings are charset=binary. I'm not too familiar with this encoding format.

Does anyone know how to handle this encoding?

Thanks a lot for your time.

Answer 1

"Binary" encoding pretty much means that the encoding is unknown.

Everything is binary data under the hood. In text files each byte, or sequence of bytes, represents a specific character, and which character in particular depends on the encoding the file was encoded with/you're interpreting the file with. Some encodings are unambiguously recognisable, others aren't (e.g. any file is valid in any single-byte encoding, you can't easily distinguish one single-byte encoding from another). What file is telling you with charset=binary is that it doesn't have any more specific information than that the file contains bits and bytes (Capt'n Obvious to the rescue). It's up to you to interpret the file in the correct encoding/interpret it as the correct file format.