encoding problem?

i work with txt files, and i recently found e.g. these characters in a few of them:

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Bdj6J3f4

what could these characters be? wrong character-encoding? i just want to use normal UTF-8 TXT files, but when i use:

iconv -t UTF-8 input.txt > output.txt

it's still the same.

When i open the files in gedit, copy+paste them in another txt files, then there's no characters like in the ones in pastebin. so gedit can solve this problem, it encodes the TXT files well. but there are too many txt files.

why are there http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Bdj6J3f4 -like chars in the text files? can they be converted to "normal chars"? I can't see e.g.: the "ÃŒ" char, when i open the files with vim, only aft开发者_运维知识库er i "work with them" (e.g.: awk, etc)

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It would help if you posted the actual binary content of your file (perhaps by using the output of od -t x1). The pastebin returns this as HTML:

"ÃŒ" "Ã" "é"

The first line corresponds to U+00C3 U+0152. THe last line corresponds to U+00C3 U+00A9, which is the string "\ux00e9" in UTF ("\xc3\xa9") with the UTF-8 bytes reinterpreted as Latin-1.

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From man iconv:

The iconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. More precisely, it converts from the encoding given for the -f option to the encoding given for the -t option. Either of these encodings defaults to the encoding of the current locale

Because you didn't specify the -f option it assumes the file is encoded with your current locale's encoding (probably UTF-8), which apparently is not true. Your text editors (gedit, vim) do some encoding detection - you can check which encoding do they detect (I don't know how - I don't use any of them) and use that as -f iconv option (or save the open file with your desired encoding using one of those text editors).

You can also use some tool for encoding detection like Python chardet module:

$ python -c "import chardet as c; print c.detect(open('file.txt').read(4096))"
{'confidence': 0.7331842298102511, 'encoding': 'ISO-8859-2'}

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..solved !

how:

i just right clicked on the folders containing the TXT files, and pasted them to another folder.. :O and presto..theres no more ugly chars..