Newbie question about text encoding

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015, at 10:10, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Ah, okay. :) But even with that level of confidence, you still have to
> pick between Latin-1 and CP-1252, which you can't tell based on this
> one snippet. Welcome to untagged encodings.

Or Latin-9 (ISO 8859-15) That was popular on Linux systems for a while
before everyone switched to UTF-8 - it's got the Euro sign, and
(relevant to French) the "oe" ligature, and uppercase Y with diaeresis,
at the expense of "generic currency" and fractions.

Or it could be Latin-3, Latin-5 (8859-9), or Latin-8 (8859-14) - they
are not commonly used for French locales, being primarily intended for
other languages, but they do support all characters (at least all from
Latin-1) used in French names. I assume there are likewise several
Windows codepages it could be.