In particular, this will almost certainly have different answers depending on the OS. So please answer in as full generality as you can and where you need to place restrictions, please make them clear. I don't have a specific example file in mind here, this is a 'generic' question hoping to build a useful resource.I realise that this is only tangentially related to TeX and friends, so am fully prepared to be told to look elsewhere, but I think that this is quite common and especially (due to the fact that it seems one has to be super-aware of encodings with TeX) important for TeXers.So: how do I do that? (Included subquestion: how do I determine the encoding of a file?) But sometimes I get sent documents in weird encodings, and sometimes I want to resurrect some old document, maybe to include a section in a new document, so from time to time I find myself wanting to change the encoding of a document. That would be fine if it were just me: I've learned to love UTF-8 and have even embraced xelatex. Now I live in the land of my great-great-.-great grandfathers who have a slightly mangled alphabet and ASCII no longer suffices. ASCII was enough for my great-great grandfather so it was enough for me. You're stuck.Back in the old days, before I left the hallowed shores of my native country, I didn't much care what encoding my files were in.

If || Įcho 'None of the encondings worked. Iconv -f $i -t utf-8 $1 2> /dev/null > $SINK

#hard way, need the user to visually check the difference between the original and re-encoded files I tried to prevent adverse effects by using it on files with a random suffix, but I'm not making any promises.Įcho 'ERROR: need one input argument: file of which the enconding is to be detected.'ĮNCOD=$(file -mime-encoding $1 | awk '') There's a rm -f in there, so there be monsters. If 'bad things' happen as a result of using this script, don't blame me.

It skips over encodings that produce a large diff output ('large' as defined by the MAX_DIFF_LINES variable or the second input argument), since those are most likely the wrong encoding.

If that fails, it goes through all encodings and shows the diff between the original and re-encoded file. It first tries to iconv from the encoding returned by file -mime-encoding to utf-8. I implemented the bash script below, it works for me.

Mac change text encoding