Gibberish in Ubuntu when dealing with documents / websites

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:12:26 +0100, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:

> 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

An other, often used, programm for this is the good old recode. "man 
recode" for instructions.

Aart