iconv encoding conversion

Alligator Wine

Hi,

I'm trying to read data in from two files, but I'm not sure what encoding they use. Both are Japanese text, and when I open them up in firefox and check under View - Character Encoding, one supposedly uses 'UTF-8' and the other 'SHIFT_JIS'.

Now I want both files (utf8File and shiftJISFile) to be encoded in SHIFT_JIS, so started up a prompt in unix and typed:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t SHIFT_JIS utf8File > shiftJISFile

The iconv command, should convert a file from one encoding set into antother, but I end up getting the error:
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 0. This leads me to believe that Firefox has misinterpreted the file as being 'UTF-8'.

Are there any clear ways of determining the encoding of a file, or does anyone know of another program to convert encodings?

Thanks

ast

In the past I have found this very useful for this kind of work.

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html

tred

Alligator Wine wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to read data in from two files, but I'm not sure what encoding they use. Both are Japanese text, and when I open them up in firefox and check under View - Character Encoding, one supposedly uses 'UTF-8' and the other 'SHIFT_JIS'.

Now I want both files (utf8File and shiftJISFile) to be encoded in SHIFT_JIS, so started up a prompt in unix and typed:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t SHIFT_JIS utf8File > shiftJISFile

The iconv command, should convert a file from one encoding set into antother, but I end up getting the error:
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 0. This leads me to believe that Firefox has misinterpreted the file as being 'UTF-8'.

Are there any clear ways of determining the encoding of a file, or does anyone know of another program to convert encodings?

Thanks

cat $FTMP | /usr/bin/iconv -f $INCODE -t $OUTCODE 2>/dev/null > $FTMP.jis

i think u need to pass in an extra parameter after the file for null. This works for me fine.