Converting encoding from unknown-8bit to us-ascii not supported

Question

I am trying to convert from unknown-8bit to us-ascii by using iconv. I have $ iconv -f unknown-8bit -t us-ascii file.txt > file1.txt

It shows an error message.

iconv: conversion from `unknown-8bit' is not supported
Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.

Is there an alternative to conduct the conversion? Thank you!!

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 08 '16 at 22:18

11

You could use cat -v, e.g.,

cat -v file.txt > file1.txt

On most platforms, that will give an ASCII file.

answered Jul 08 '16 at 22:18

Thomas Dickey

Accentuated characters (é, è, ê, ...) are lost in the new file. Is there a way keep them? – Psddp Feb 04 '19 at 21:32
Those aren't ASCII. In a quick-test, I'm seeing those become `M-i, M-h, M-j, ...`, which is expected. – Thomas Dickey Feb 04 '19 at 21:59
@ThomasDickey why is this encoding expected and do you have a list of what they represent? – Guilherme Sampaio May 13 '20 at 01:38
The accented characters are coded in the range 160-255, while US-ASCII is only defined for (printable) 32-126, so any program that handles the conversion will use some workaround to represent the out-of-range codes. The "M" denotes meta, which is used for instance in [terminfo](https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/terminfo.5.html#h3-Miscellaneous) and curses. iconv came "later", so it didn't originate the "M". – Thomas Dickey May 13 '20 at 08:03

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 13 '19 at 09:27

with accents, you can set it in vim as mentioned in this post: Set encoding and fileencoding to utf-8 in Vim

In my case, I have issue on '…', '−' and '-', I open the file under vim, correct issues and run in vim

:set fileencoding=utf-8

then save it and my file is utf-8 encoded!

2 Answers2