Vim not encoding with UTF-8

Question

I'm using Vim, installed from the Arch Linux repo.

I've tried adding set fileencodings=utf-8 and set encoding=utf-8. I've tried with all caps (UTF instead of utf) and putting it in /etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc.

More over, I tried writing a file as UTF-8 using :write ++enc=utf-8 but that didn't work either.

I'm testing the files with file test and it keeps telling me it's ASCII text. This is a problem since I use non-ASCII characters.

Answer 1

I feel like an idiot. The test file doesn't have any non-ASCII characters in it, so there is nothing for file to look for that would tell it the encoding Vim is using. So I repeated the test with ä in it and it returns "utf-8" as desired.

In short, file was doing its best, and Vim was doing what I wanted it to do.