I have a bash script which extract data from an oracle database. I use spool to extract data. After extraction I format the file by removing and replacing some characters. My problem is after formating the files are in ANSI encoding instead of ut8.
Extraction with spool. The file is utf8
Format with cat and tr command and redirect in another file. This file is ansi.
The same process works fine on Aix system. I try iconv but it doesnt work. Do you please have an idea why the encoding changes from utf8 to ansi ? How to correct it please ?
You should consequently use either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. In the latter case, don't use tr as it doesn't (yet?) support multi-byte characters, use sed instead (e.g sed 's/deletethis//g').
ISO-8859-1:
export LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.ISO-8859-1
export NLS_LANG=French_France.WE8ISO8859P1
# fetch data from Oracle, emulated by the following line
echo 'âêîôû' >test.latin1 # 5 bytes (+lineend)
# perform formatting, eg:
sed 's/ê/[e-circumflex]/g' test.latin1
# or the same with hex-codes:
sed $'s/\xea/[e-circumflex]/g' test.latin1
UTF-8:
export LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8
export NLS_LANG=French_France.AL32UTF8
# fetch data from Oracle, emulated by the following line
echo 'âêîôû' >test.utf8 # 10 bytes (+lineend)
# perform formatting, eg:
sed 's/ê/[e-circumflex]/g' test.utf8
# or the same with hex-codes:
sed $'s/\xc3\xaa/[e-circumflex]/g' test.utf8
Note: no conversion (iconv, recode, etc) is required, just make sure NLS_LANG and LC_CTYPE are compatible. (Also, your terminal(emulator) should be set accordingly; for PuTTY it is Configuration/Category/Window/Translation/Remote-character-set.)
Original answer:
I cannot tell what's wrong with the formatting you perform, but here is a method to damage the utf8-encoded text:
$ echo 'ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP' | iconv -f iso-8859-2 -t utf-8 | xxd
00000000: c381 5256 c38d 5a54 c5b0 52c5 9020 54c3 ..RV..ZT..R.. T.
00000010: 9c4b c396 5246 c39a 52c3 9347 c389 500a .K..RF..R..G..P.
$ echo 'ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP' | iconv -f iso-8859-2 -t utf-8 | tr -d $'\200-\237' | xxd
00000000: c352 56c3 5a54 c5b0 52c5 2054 c34b c352 .RV.ZT..R. T.K.R
00000010: 46c3 52c3 47c3 500a F.R.G.P.
Here the tr -d $'\200-\237' part deleted half of the utf8-sequences (c381 became c3, c590 became c5), rendering the text unusable.
Related
I've just inherited a legacy project in which my predecessor pushed incorrectly encoded files.
The comments, in French, should include special characters as é,è,ç etc.
But, for instance here, a 'é' is shown as 'é'.
I'm looking for a command line tool to handle all files of the project. I'm pretty sure iconv should to the trick, but what I tried so far did not work :
Here are some initial informations:
# problematic file example
$ file Parametres.cpp
Parametres.cpp: C source, ISO-8859 text
# check that my OS handles utf8
$echo "éè" > test.tmp
$ file test.tmp
test.tmp: UTF-8 Unicode text
$ cat test.tmp
éè
I tried whithout success (meaning in Parametres.cpp.utf8 i still got 'é') :
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 Parametres.cpp -o Parametres.cpp.utf8
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8//TRANSLIT Parametres.cpp -o Parametres.cpp.utf8
iconv -f ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT -t UTF-8 Parametres.cpp -o Parametres.cpp.utf8
My guess is that the original encoding was not ISO-8859-1 but something else. And due to misconfigured IDE, chars 'Ã' and '©' got definitly encoded in ISO-8859-1. From what I understood, TRANSLIT should to the job, but it seems not.
So, here are my questions :
is there a better tool than iconv to do this job in CentOS7.2 (yes, I know. Legacy is legacy...) ?
Or, How to determine (or guess) the original encoding to make iconv solve my problem ?
Any help or ideas are appreciated :-)
I have a set of md files, some of them are utf-8 encoded, and others are not (windows-1256 actually).
I want to convert only non-utf-8 files to utf-8.
The following script can partly do the job:
for file in *.md;
do
iconv -f windows-1256 -t utf-8 "$file" -o "${file%.md}.🆕.md";
done
I still need to exclude the original utf-8 files from this process, (maybe using file command?). Try the following command to understand what I mean:
file --mime-encoding *
Notice that although file command isn't smart enough to detect the right character set of non-utf-8 files, It's enough in this case that it can distinguish between utf-8 and non-utf-8 files.
Thanks in advance for help.
You can use for example an if statement:
if file --mime-encoding "$file" | grep -v -q utf-8 ; then
iconv -f windows-1256 -t utf-8 "$file" -o "${file%.md}.🆕.md";
fi
If grep doesn't find a match, it returns a status code indicating failure. The if statement tests the status code
I want to search for text in a specified coding system (cp1251/UTF-8/UTF-16-le/iso-8859-4, etc) in a file hierarchy.
For example I have source code in cp1251 coding and I run Debian with system coding UTF-8. grep or Midnight Commander perform searches in UTF-8 coding. So I can not find Russian words.
Preferred solutions will use standard POSIX or GNU command line utilities (like grep).
MC or Emacs solution also appreciated.
I tried:
$ grep `echo Привет | iconv -f cp1251 -t utf-8` *
but this command does not show results sometimes.
The command you proposed outputs the string Привет, then pipes the result of that output to iconv and applies grep to the result of iconv. That is not what you want. What you want is this:
find . -type f -printf "iconv -f cp1251 -t utf-8 '%p' | grep --label '%p' -H 'Привет'\n" | sh
This applies iconv, followed by grep, to every file below the current directory.
But note that this assumes that all of your files are in CP1251. It will fail if only some of them are. In that case you'd first have to write a program that detects the encoding of a file and then applies iconv only if necessary.
From the command line:
LANG=ru_RU.cp1251 grep Привет *
I want to use iconv to convert files on my Mac. The goal is to go from "Windows ANSI" to "whatever Windows Notepad saves, if you tell it to use UFT8".
This is what I want:
$ file names.csv
names.csv: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text, with CRLF line terminators
This is what I use:
$ iconv -f CP1252 -t UTF-8 names.csv > names.utf8.csv
This is what I get (not what I want):
$ file names.utf8.csv
names.utf8.csv: UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF line terminators
How do I get the BOM?
You can add it manually by first echoing the bytes into the file:
echo -ne '\xEF\xBB\xBF' > names.utf8.csv
and then concatenating your required information at the end:
iconv -f CP1252 -t UTF-8 names.csv >> names.utf8.csv
Note the >> rather than >.
Note that "Windows ANSI" may not be CP1252 - that is configured by users.
The BOM is not necessary for UTF-8.
And Windows Notepad can save UTF-8 with or without BOM.
I needed the opossite. (covert german text from UTF-8 to ANSI)
So command I used:
1. iconv -l (check available formats)
2. iconv -f UTF8 -t MS-ANSI de.txt > output.txt
and now if I open output.txt it is already in ANSI. Job done.
How would an awk script (presumably a one-liner) for removing a BOM look like?
Specification:
print every line after the first (NR > 1)
for the first line: If it starts with #FE #FF or #FF #FE, remove those and print the rest
Using GNU sed (on Linux or Cygwin):
# Removing BOM from all text files in current directory:
sed -i '1 s/^\xef\xbb\xbf//' *.txt
On FreeBSD:
sed -i .bak '1 s/^\xef\xbb\xbf//' *.txt
Advantage of using GNU or FreeBSD sed: the -i parameter means "in place", and will update files without the need for redirections or weird tricks.
On Mac:
This awk solution in another answer works, but the sed command above does not work. At least on Mac (Sierra) sed documentation does not mention supporting hexadecimal escaping ala \xef.
A similar trick can be achieved with any program by piping to the sponge tool from moreutils:
awk '…' INFILE | sponge INFILE
Try this:
awk 'NR==1{sub(/^\xef\xbb\xbf/,"")}{print}' INFILE > OUTFILE
On the first record (line), remove the BOM characters. Print every record.
Or slightly shorter, using the knowledge that the default action in awk is to print the record:
awk 'NR==1{sub(/^\xef\xbb\xbf/,"")}1' INFILE > OUTFILE
1 is the shortest condition that always evaluates to true, so each record is printed.
Enjoy!
-- ADDENDUM --
Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) FAQ includes the following table listing the exact BOM bytes for each encoding:
Bytes | Encoding Form
--------------------------------------
00 00 FE FF | UTF-32, big-endian
FF FE 00 00 | UTF-32, little-endian
FE FF | UTF-16, big-endian
FF FE | UTF-16, little-endian
EF BB BF | UTF-8
Thus, you can see how \xef\xbb\xbf corresponds to EF BB BF UTF-8 BOM bytes from the above table.
Not awk, but simpler:
tail -c +4 UTF8 > UTF8.nobom
To check for BOM:
hd -n 3 UTF8
If BOM is present you'll see: 00000000 ef bb bf ...
In addition to converting CRLF line endings to LF, dos2unix also removes BOMs:
dos2unix *.txt
dos2unix also converts UTF-16 files with a BOM (but not UTF-16 files without a BOM) to UTF-8 without a BOM:
$ printf '\ufeffä\n'|iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16be>bom-utf16be
$ printf '\ufeffä\n'|iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le>bom-utf16le
$ printf '\ufeffä\n'>bom-utf8
$ printf 'ä\n'|iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16be>utf16be
$ printf 'ä\n'|iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le>utf16le
$ printf 'ä\n'>utf8
$ for f in *;do printf '%11s %s\n' $f $(xxd -p $f);done
bom-utf16be feff00e4000a
bom-utf16le fffee4000a00
bom-utf8 efbbbfc3a40a
utf16be 00e4000a
utf16le e4000a00
utf8 c3a40a
$ dos2unix -q *
$ for f in *;do printf '%11s %s\n' $f $(xxd -p $f);done
bom-utf16be c3a40a
bom-utf16le c3a40a
bom-utf8 c3a40a
utf16be 00e4000a
utf16le e4000a00
utf8 c3a40a
I know the question was directed at unix/linux, thought it would be worth to mention a good option for the unix-challenged (on windows, with a UI).
I ran into the same issue on a WordPress project (BOM was causing problems with rss feed and page validation) and I had to look into all the files in a quite big directory tree to find the one that was with BOM. Found an application called Replace Pioneer and in it:
Batch Runner -> Search (to find all the files in the subfolders) -> Replace Template -> Binary remove BOM (there is a ready made search and replace template for this).
It was not the most elegant solution and it did require installing a program, which is a downside. But once I found out what was going around me, it worked like a charm (and found 3 files out of about 2300 that were with BOM).