How to convert ISO8859-15 to UTF8?

Question

I have an Arabic file encoded in ISO8859-15. How can I convert it into UTF8?
I used iconv but it doesn't work for me.

iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 Myfile.txt

I wanted to attach the file, but I don't know how.

Answer 1

I'm well aware that this question is over a decade old; nevertheless, I'd like to give another suggestion, namely, to use recode — an old, but well-maintained utility tool, and which not only fully supports libiconv, but it adds a few more character encodings, and, perhaps most interestingly, it allows in-place replacements of transcoded files — this means that the many solutions provided above that require making a copy first and then moving the final file to its destination (with the side-effect that the date of last modification of the original gets lost...) are not necessary.

I find recode especially useful for changing ancient static HTML files from ISO-Latin-1 into UTF-8, while preserving the original date, and doing so recursively, if needed.

recode is available from most package managers (Homebrew on macOS, apt on Debian/Ubuntu) but can also be retrieved from Reuben Thomas' GitHub repository, if needed, and locally compiled; it's being actively maintained and does regular releases.

Answer 2

I have ubuntu 14 and the other answers where no working for me

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 in.tex -o out.tex

I found this command here

Answer 3

We have this problem and to solve

Create a script file called to-utf8.sh

#!/bin/bash
TO="UTF-8"; FILE=$1
FROM=$(file -i $FILE | cut -d'=' -f2)
if [[ $FROM = "binary" ]]; then
 echo "Skipping binary $FILE..."
 exit 0
fi
iconv -f $FROM -t $TO -o $FILE.tmp $FILE; ERROR=$?
if [[ $ERROR -eq 0 ]]; then
  echo "Converting $FILE..."
  mv -f $FILE.tmp $FILE
else
  echo "Error on $FILE"
fi

Set the executable bit

chmod +x to-utf8.sh

Do a conversion

./to-utf8.sh MyFile.txt

If you want to convert all files under a folder, do

find /your/folder/here | xargs -n 1 ./to-utf8.sh

Hope it's help.

Answer 4

I got the same problem, but i find the answer in this page! it works for me, you can try it.

iconv -f cp936 -t utf-8 

Answer 5

in my case, the file command tells a wrong encoding, so i tried converting with all the possible encodings, and found out the right one.

execute this script and check the result file.

for i in `iconv -l`
do
   echo $i
   iconv -f $i -t UTF-8 yourfile | grep "hint to tell converted success or not"
done &>/tmp/converted

Answer 6

Iconv just writes the converted text to stdout. You have to use -o OUTPUTFILE.txt as an parameter or write stdout to a file. (iconv -f x -t z filename.txt > OUTPUTFILE.txt or iconv -f x -t z < filename.txt > OUTPUTFILE.txt in some iconv versions)

Synopsis

iconv -f encoding -t encoding inputfile

Description

The iconv program converts the encoding of characters in inputfile from one coded character set to another. 
**The result is written to standard output unless otherwise specified by the --output option.**

--from-code, -f encoding

Convert characters from encoding

--to-code, -t encoding

Convert characters to encoding

--list

List known coded character sets

--output, -o file

Specify output file (instead of stdout)

--verbose

Print progress information.

Answer 7

You can use ISO-8859-9 encoding:

iconv -f ISO-8859-9 Agreement.txt -t UTF-8 -o agreement.txt

Answer 8

I found this to work for me:

iconv -f ISO-8859-14 Agreement.txt -t UTF-8 -o agreement.txt

Answer 9

Could it be that your file is not ISO-8859-15 encoded? You should be able to check with the file command:

file YourFile.txt

Also, you can use iconv without providing the encoding of the original file:

iconv -t UTF-8 YourFile.txt