windows 7 - How to automatically detect text file charset and convert it to UTF-8

07
2014-07
  • Annie

    Is there any way to auto-detect character encoding of a text file and convert it to UTF-8? I'm using Windows 7.

    • Answers
  • user1301428

    You can do this with Notepad++ if you are on Windows. Have a look at this question on stackoverflow for an example of how to do it.


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    linux - How can I convert multiple files to UTF-8 encoding using *nix command line tools?
  • jason

    Possible Duplicate:
    Batch-convert files for encoding or line ending

    I have a bunch of text files that I'd like to convert from any given charset to UTF-8 encoding.

    Are there any command line tools or Perl (or language of your choice) one liners I can use to do this en masse?


    • Related Answers
  • grawity

    iconv does convert between many character encodings. So adding a little bash magic and we can write

    for file in *.txt; do
    iconv -f ascii -t utf-8 "$file" -o "${file%.txt}.utf8.txt"
done

    This will run iconv -f ascii -t utf-8 to every file ending in .txt, sending the recoded file to a file with the same name but ending in .utf8.txt instead of .txt.

    It's not as if this would actually do anything to your files (because ASCII is a subset of UTF-8), but to answer your question about how to convert between encodings.