Gibberish in Ubuntu when dealing with documents / websites

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Hi,

"Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen at gmail.com> writes:
> As my native language is not ASCII-compatible, myself and other Ubuntu
> users in my area often have problems with Gibberish (wrongly-encoded
> text) when exchanging documents with users of non-UTF-8 operating
> systems *ahem* MS Windows *ahem*. I would like to know if other people
> / locales suffer from this problem. If so, please send to me the
> letters of your alphabet so that I can try to compie a list of
> problematic letters (see my .sig for examples of some alphabets). I am
> trying to write a script that will help decode this Gibberish back
> into the correct encoding, but I need to know which letters are
> problematic for other Ubuntu users. Thanks.

You can use `iconv' to convert text between different encodings.  It can
only handle plain text though as it doesn't know anything about binary
file formats.

If you know the input and output encoding, just run

  iconv -f [input-encoding] -t [output-encoding] -o [output-file] [input-file]

To get a list of encodings supported by iconv run

  iconv -l

Regards,
Ansgar

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