Unicode Explained

Free Recode is available as an executable (.exe) file for Windows. When installing it, it

is best to add the name of the folder where you put it into the default path. (You do

not need to do this if you put the file into the same folder as your data files, but gets

rather awkward if you perform many transcodings.) Then you can use Free Recode via

the command-line interface (DOS prompt) using a command like:

recode cp-437..windows-1252 test.txt

This command takes the content of the file test.txt, interprets it as CP-437 encoded,

and transcodes it into windows-1252. The result overwrites the original content of

test.txt.

There are several converters available commercially, too. You may find them more

suitable, maybe due to a graphic user interface or wider support of different encodings.

Searching Google for “character * converter” can be useful in finding them.

The iconv Converter

Unix systems normally contain a converter called iconv, which has a simple interface,

where you specify the source (“from”) encoding after the switch -f, the destination

(“to”) encoding after the switch -t, and then the source file. The result is written to

standard output, which you can direct to a file as usual on Unix. For example:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 demo.txt >demo.utf

Check man iconv for more instructions. Beware that your system might have an old

version of iconv, with rather limited support for different ...