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    What is the file spec simply a flat file - however the normal way is ask the provider of the spec to explain as it is not clear Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 17:40
  • This maybe relevant: stackoverflow.com/questions/3825390/… Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 18:16
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    @mathewb You should not assume anything, if the spec is not clear you should ask for clarification. You can ensure whatever you want but if the other parties do not expect that it's not going to work well. Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 20:00
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    Your question is unclear. ASCII and Unicode are different things, you cannot contrast them in the way you do. ASCII is both a character set (i.e. literally an unordered collection of unique characters) and a character encoding (i.e. it assigns a single unambiguous bit pattern to each character from the character set so that there is a bijective function between characters and bit patterns). Unicode is also a character set (like ASCII), but it is not a concrete encoding like ASCII, it is only an abstract encoding. Unicode doesn't assign bit patterns to characters, only an abstract integer. Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 20:36
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    Therefore, it is simply impossible for a file to be "encoded in Unicode", since Unicode doesn't have an encoding. There are many, many, many different encodings for Unicode, like UTF-9, UTF-18, UTF-7,5, UTF-7, UTF-32LE, UTF-32BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, and UTF-8, to name just a few. Actually, the ASCII character set is a subset of Unicode, which makes the ASCII encoding a Unicode encoding for that particular Unicode subset. So, in some sense, any ASCII file is a "Unicode file", so distinguishing between ASCII files and Unicode files also doesn't make sense from that perspective. Commented Aug 22, 2018 at 20:39