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Character Encoding

The topic of character encoding truly deserves a more in depth discussion than we are prepared to grant it. Being completely self taught, we are aware this topic was part of an introductionary lecture we missed out on, and unfortunately it is one of the foundational pieces of knowledge for computer science. There is an abundance of different character sets, because computers are required to display a bunch of different forms of languages and symbols. Different character sets variate in the actual size in bits the character itself is comprised of. For example the most common character set is UTF-8, which stands for “Universal Transformation Format 8 bits”, and each character is comprised of 8 bits. Yada, yada, yada, etc …

Encoding tools

If running one of the *nixs, there are four tools at your disposal to handle issues encountered with file encoding, these are enca, enconv, iconv, uconv, and recode.

enca and enconv are sibling tools and commonly come together in the same package named after the first of these tools, enca. enca is primarily used to detect charsets, encodings, and language based encodings. Where enconv is used to encode a file into a desired charset, encoding, or language based encoding.

iconv and uconv are NOT sibling programs at all, but perform similar functions.

recode converts files from one character set to another.

Examples

Here is what you came for. Simple examples

recode utf8..ISO-8859-1 my-file.txt - converts files encoded with utf8 to iso-8859-1