Converting lots of files from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 with help of iconv

25 November 2011

On one of my projects, I needed to convert lots of files previously encoded in ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.

You could manage it with help of some text editors, or convert all files in one single script.

This snippet will replace all files in ISO-8859-1 by it’s UTF-8 versions.

for a in *.yourext; do iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t utf8 $a > $a.utf8; mv -f $a.utf8 $a; done;

  • In my case files were under version control. If it’s not the case for You, You could still make a static backup.

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