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Accepted
Sadi
Asked: 2013-02-06 04:21:16 +0800 CST

How to batch convert legacy files to UTF8?

  • 772

I think the ideal solution for me is a Nautilus Script that performs encoding conversion on selected files.

The following script reads the encoding of a selected file and performs utf8 conversion if it's not utf8, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work on multiple files:

CHARSET="$(file -bi "$1"|awk -F "=" '{print $2}')"
if [ "$CHARSET" != utf-8 ]; then
iconv -f "$CHARSET" -t utf8 "$1" -c -o "$1.utf8"
fi
conversion

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Let's say your script is named convert-to-utf-8.sh. Here's how you would make it work across multiple files:

    for filename in file1 file2 file3 ; do ./convert-to-utf-8.sh "$filename" ; done

    You could incorporate that for-loop in the script itself, like this:

    for filename in "$@"; do
    CHARSET="$(file -bi "$filename"|awk -F "=" '{print $2}')"
    if [ "$CHARSET" != utf-8 ]; then
        iconv -f "$CHARSET" -t utf8 "$filename" -c -o "$filename.utf8"
    fi
done

    You could then run the script with multiple filenames like this:

    ./convert-to-utf-8.sh file1 file2 file3
    • 5

  2. Here's a nice and simple Nautilus Script that I've managed to write thanks to Flimm as seen in the answer above:

    #!/bin/sh
#Nautilus Script to determine encoding of selected file(s) and convert to utf8 if necessary
#
for filename in $@; do
    CHARSET="$(file -bi "$filename"|awk -F "=" '{print $2}')"
    if [ "$CHARSET" != utf-8 ]; then
        iconv -f "$CHARSET" -t utf8 "$filename" -c -o "$filename.utf8" &&
        mv -f "$filename.utf8" "$filename"
    fi
done
    • 2