I have several hundred txt files that have lost their correct encoding between OS / external hard drives. I am trying to convert them back with iconv but can't figure out how to fix the encoding.
Might be worth mentioning that I am on MacOS and using the Node.js package: iconv-lite.
What I've tried:
Decoding (reading the file) -> Encoding (writing back to):
UTF-8 -> UTF-16 / 32
UTF-8 -> ISO-8859-1 / ISO-8859-1
ISO-8859-1 / 7 -> UTF-8
Examples of wrong encodings:
Wrong -> Correct:
Ê -> æ
¯ -> ø
But it's not just a single language. The original encoding might very well have been Japanese but opening the files it says that it's UTF-8 so I don't know what it originally was.
How do I fix the encoding issues. What should it be read as, written as? How do I avoid that this will ever happen again?
Related
When on Windows 10 I open a certain file in a Visual Studio Code, and then edit and save the file, the VSC seems to replace certain characters with another characters so that some text in the saved file looks corrupted as shown on the picture below. The default character encoding used in the VSC is UTF-8.
Non-corrupted string before saving the file:“Diff Clang Compiler Log Files”
Corrupted string after saving the file:
�Diff Clang Compiler Log Files�
So for example the double quotation mark character " which in the original file is represtented by byte string 0xE2 0x80 0x9C upon saving the file will be converted into 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD. I do not fully understand what the root cause is, but I do have the following assumption:
The original file is saved using the Windows-1252 Encoding (I am using Win 10 machine, German keyboard)
VSC faulty interprets the file with UTF-8 encoding
Characters codes get converted from Windows-1252 into UTF-8 once the file is saved, thus 0xE2 0x80 0x9C becomes 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD.
Is my understanding corrrect?
Can I somehow detect (through powershell or python code) whether a file uses Windows-1252 or UTF-8 encoding? Or there is no definite way to determine that? I would really be glad to find a way on how to avoid corrupting my files in the future :-).
Thank you!
The encoding of the file can be found with the help of python magic module
import magic
FILE_PATH = 'C:\\myPath'
def getFileEncoding (filePath):
blob = open(filePath, 'rb').read()
m = magic.Magic(mime_encoding=True)
fileEncoding = m.from_buffer(blob)
return fileEncoding
fileEncoding = getFileEncoding ( FILE_PATH )
print (f"File Encoding: {fileEncoding}")
In my source files I have string containing non-ASCII characters like
sCursorFormat = TRANSLATE("Frequency (Hz): %s\nDegree (°): %s");
But when I extract them they vanish like
msgid ""
"Frequency (Hz): %s\n"
"Degree (): %s"
msgstr ""
I have specified the encoding when extracting as
xgettext --from-code=UTF-8
I'm running under MS Windows and the source files are C++ (not that it should matter).
The encoding of your source file is probably not UTF-8, but ANSI, which stands for whatever the encoding for non-Unicode applications is (probably code page 1252). If you would open the file in some hex editor you would see byte 0x80 standing for degree symbol. This byte is not a valid UTF-8 character. In UTF-8 encoding degree symbol is represented with two bytes 0xC2 0xB0. This is why the byte vanishes when using --from-code=UTF-8.
The solution for your problem is to use --from-code=windows-1252. OR, better yet, to save all source files as UTF-8, and then use --from-code=UTF-8.
I have a file that I'm pretty sure is in a weird encoding. I've successfully converted similar files to utf-8 previously by assuming they were encoded in windows-1255 using iconv (iconv -f windows-1255 -t utf-8 $file) and this has worked successfully.
My current file contains a ß character that is throwing me off - iconv breaks when it hits this (with an "illegal input sequence" error). Is there a different kind of encoding I should be using?
WINDOWS-1255 (= Hebrew) does not know an Eszett (ß), so ICONV behaves correctly. Other legacy codepages that know that character on code point 00DF:
WINDOWS-1250 = Latin 2 / Central European
WINDOWS-1252 = Latin 1 / Western European
WINDOWS-1254 = Turkish
WINDOWS-1257 = Baltic
WINDOWS-1258 = Vietnamese
Only the document owner knows which codepage is the correct one. If it's one of the WINDOWS-125x at all.
I have a question about converting UTF-8 to CP1252 in Ubuntu with PHP or SHELL.
Background : Converting a csv file from UTF-8 to CP1252 in Ubuntu with PHP or SHELL, copy file from Ubuntu to Windows, open file with nodepad++.
Environment :
Ubuntu 10.04
PHP 5.3
a file csv with letters (œ, à, ç)
Methods used :
With PHP
iconv("UTF-8", "CP1252", "content of file")
or
mb_convert_encoding("content of file", "UTF-8", "CP1252")
If I check the generated file with
file -i name_of_the_file
It displayed :
name_of_the_file: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
I copy this converted file to windows and opened with notepad++, in the bottom of the right, we can see the encoding is ANSI
And when I changed the encoding from ANSI to Windows-1252, the specials characters were well displayed.
With Shell
iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP1252" "content of file"
The rest will be the same .
Question :
1. Why the command file did not display directly CP1252 or ANSI but ISO-8895-1 ?
2. Why the specials characters could be well displayed when I changed the encoding from ANSI to Windows-1252.
Thank you in advance !
1.
CP1252 and ISO-8859-1 are very similar, quite often a file encoded in one of them would look identically as the file encoded in the second one. See Wikipedia to see which characters are in Windows-1252 and not in ISO-8859-1.
Letters à and ç are encoded identically in both encodings. While ISO-8859-1 doesn't have an œ and CP1252 does, file might have missed that. AFAIK it doesn't analyse the entire file.
2.
"ANSI" is a misnomer used for the default non-Unicode encoding in Windows. In case of Western European languages, ANSI means Windows-1252. In case of Central European, it's Windows-1250, in case of Russian it's Windows-1251, and so on. Nothing apart from Windows uses the term "ANSI" to refer to an encoding.
I'm having a problem trying to read in windows a CSV file generated in MAC.
My question is how can I convert the encoding to UTF-8 or even ISO-8859-1.
I've already tried iconv with no success.
Inside "vim" I can understand that in this file linebreaks are marked with ^M and the accent ã is marked with <8b>, Ç = <82> and so on.
Any ideas?
To convert from encoding a to encoding b, you need to know what encoding a is.
Given that
ã is marked with <8b>, Ç = <82>
encoding a is very likely Mac OS Roman.
So call iconv with macintosh* as from argument, and utf-8 as to argument.
*try macroman, x-mac-roman etc if macintosh is not found