Best way to convert text files between character sets?

Question

What is the fastest, easiest tool or method to convert text files between character sets?

Specifically, I need to convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-15 and vice versa.

Answer 1

There is also a web tool to convert file encoding: https://webtool.cloud/change-file-encoding

It supports wide range of encodings, including some rare ones, like IBM code page 37.

Answer 2

Assuming, you don't know the input encoding and still wish to automate most of the conversion, I concluded this one liner from summing up previous answers.

iconv -f $(chardetect input.text | awk '{print $2}') -t utf-8 -o output.text

Answer 3

Use this Python script: https://github.com/goerz/convert_encoding.py Works on any platform. Requires Python 2.7.

Answer 4

Get-Content -Encoding UTF8 FILE-UTF8.TXT | Out-File -Encoding UTF7 FILE-UTF7.TXT

The shortest version, if you can assume that the input BOM is correct:

gc FILE.TXT | Out-File -en utf7 file-utf7.txt

Answer 5

iconv(1)

iconv -f FROM-ENCODING -t TO-ENCODING file.txt

Also there are iconv-based tools in many languages.

Answer 6

If macOS GUI applications are your bread and butter, SubEthaEdit is the text editor I usually go to for encoding-wrangling — its "conversion preview" allows you to see all invalid characters in the output encoding, and fix/remove them.

And it's open-source now, so yay for them