Converting text into ASCII/ISO-8859-1

Question

I'm looking for some tool that can convert text, ideally from UTF-8 (but ISO-8859-2 and WINDOWS-1250 would be fine) into ASCII/ISO-8859-1?

I have seen some online transliteration tools but I need something for the command line (and iconv is refusing to convert the file).

Solution

By default, iconv refuses to convert the file if it contains characters that do not exist in the target character set. Use //TRANSLIT to “downgrade” such characters.

iconv -f utf-8 -t iso8859-1//TRANSLIT

Comments

[Admin]

Hm, iconv is the command line tool for that task. Mind to share how exactly it refuses to serve you?

[Šimon Tóth]

Hmm, the description says otherwise. Are you sure?

[Stéphane Péchard]

@Let_Me_Be: ok, maybe I read too quickly your question... If what you need is a not only a format conversion but a character conversion (i.e. é => e), give a try to slugify then.

[Šimon Tóth]

Oh, that's totally awesome, thx.