Character Encoding: Convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

The iconv program converts the encoding of characters in an input file from one coded character set to another. The commands here have been tested on RHEL 5 but it should work on other Linux distributions just fine,

I already have a test UTF-8 encoded file,

# file -bi TestspecialchrUTF.txt
text/plain; charset=utf-8

Let's convert this file,

# iconv --from-code=utf-8 --to-code=iso-8859-1//TRANSLIT TestspecialchrUTF.txt -o TestISO8859.txt

Here the catch is TRANSLIT switch which is not present in man page of iconv at the time of writing this blog post. Now let's verify the character encoding of newly created file,

# file -bi TestISO8859.txt
text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Where, file is a unix command to determine the file type.

Any feedback will be highly appreciated.

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This post appeared on the softlexicon.com by Sumit Goel. Copyright © 2012 – softlexicon.com and Sumit Goel. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.