SciTE will automatically detect the encoding scheme used for Unicode files that start with a Byte Order Mark (BOM). The UTF-8 and UCS-2 encodings are recognized including both Little Endian and Big Endian variants of UCS-2.
UTF-8 files will also be recognised when they contain a coding cookie on one
of the first two lines. A coding cookie looks similar to "coding: utf-8"
("coding" followed by ':' or '=', optional whitespace, optional quote, "utf-8")
and is normally contained in a comment:# -*- coding: utf-8
-*-
For XML there is a declaration:<?xml version='1.0'
encoding='utf-8'?>
For other encodings set the code.page and character.set properties.