How to convert multiple ISO8859-1 to UTF-8

Question

Am trying to convert several SQL files from ISO8859-1 to UTF-8

Am doing the following command:

iconv -f ISO_8859-1 -t UTF-8 *.sql

What i get is an output of their content to the terminal which is very long and after ending the output they do not convert. They stay the same. I wish to be able to convert and not see the output.

Solution 1

iconv defaults to sending its output to stdout, which explains the behaviour of what you saw. You can direct the output to a file using the -o option, but that will only generate a single output file, and probably won't help you update the files in place. Perhaps try something like this:

for file in *.sql; do
    iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 -o "$file".utf "$file" && mv "$file".utf "$file"
done

That will convert each file and store the result in a temporary file, moving it to the original file name if the conversion was successful.

Solution 2

It is also possible to use rsync to this task, with one advantage, you will keep a backup. If one of the converted files is already in the target codification you will mess it up.

rsync -va --iconv=iso88591,utf8 /source/latin1/ /destination/utf8/

Comments

[Luis Alvarado]

That is some smart script there James. Thank you very much.

[SergioAraujo]

It is also possible to use rsync to this task, with one advantage, you will keep a backup. If one of the converted files is already in the target codification you will mess it up. rsync -va --iconv=utf8,iso88591 /source/latin1/ /destination/utf8

[James Henstridge]

@user3798: sounds like a good solution. Why not leave it as an answer so people can vote for it?