Converting files between UTF-8 and ISO-8859 on Linux
Every time I come across Unicode, nothing seems to work. I am on Linux and I got these files from Windows:
$file *
file1: UTF-8 Unicode text
file2: ISO-8859 text
file3: ISO-8859 text
Nothing worked until I found out that the files have different encodings. I want to make my life easy and have them all in one format:
iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859 file1 > test
iconv: conversion to `ISO-8859' is not supported
Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.
I tried converting to ISO because only 1 conversion +, when I open these ISO files in gedit, the German letter "ü" is displayed just fine. Ok, try this:
iconv -f ISO-8859 -t UTF-8 file2 > test
iconv: conversion from `ISO-8859' is not supported
Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.
but obviously it didn't work.
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ISO-8859-x (Latin-1) encoding only contains very limited characters, you should always try to encode UTF-8 to make life easier.
And utf-8 (Unicode) is a superset of the ISO 8859 standard, so it's no surprise that you couldn't convert UTF-8 to ISO 8859
It seems the command file
just gives very limited information about the file encoding
You can try to guess the encoding ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 or another 2 to 14 as mentioned in the comment from @hobbs
And you can get the supported encoding iconv
aticonv -l
If you think you are having a hard time guessing the real encoding of the files, this silly script might help you: D
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