Vim Diffing a pair of Unicode little endian without BOM text files in a readable format?

Question

I have a pair of "Unicode little endian without BOM" text files that I would like to diff each other via the command line. Unfortunately when I open them using the command line in vim for Windows they come up as a bunch of unreadable binary symbols because the encoding WinMerge is expecting is wrong.

Is there any way to feed these into vim in a readable format?

Answer 1

Vim's name for that encoding is ucs-2le (ucs-2 for Unicode, 2 byte per character, le for little endian). You can open that via

:edit ++enc=ucs-2le filename

enforcing the encoding, or alternatively (if you open such files often), add that encoding to the list of detected ones:

:set fileencodings^=ucs-2le