Batch convert encoding in files

Question

How can I batch-convert files in a directory for their encoding (e.g. ANSI → UTF-8) with a command or tool?

For single files, an editor helps, but how can I do the mass files job?

Answer 1

Cygwin or GnuWin32 provide Unix tools like iconv and dos2unix (and unix2dos). Under Unix/Linux/Cygwin, you'll want to use "windows-1252" as the encoding instead of ANSI (see below). (Unless you know your system is using a codepage other than 1252 as its default codepage, in which case you'll need to tell iconv the right codepage to translate from.)

Convert from one (-f) to the other (-t) with:

$ iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 infile > outfile

Or in a find-all-and-conquer form:

## this will clobber the original files!
$ find . -name '*.txt' -exec iconv --verbose -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 {} \> {} \;

Alternatively:

## this will clobber the original files!
$ find . -name '*.txt' -exec iconv --verbose -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 -o {} {} \;

---

This question has been asked many times on this site, so here's some additional information about "ANSI". In an answer to a related question, CesarB mentions:

There are several encodings which are called "ANSI" in Windows. In fact, ANSI is a misnomer. iconv has no way of guessing which you want.

The ANSI encoding is the encoding used by the "A" functions in the Windows API (the "W" functions use UTF-16). Which encoding it corresponds to usually depends on your Windows system language. The most common is CP 1252 (also known as Windows-1252). So, when your editor says ANSI, it is meaning "whatever the API functions use as the default ANSI encoding", which is the default non-Unicode encoding used in your system (and thus usually the one which is used for text files).

The page he links to gives this historical tidbit (quoted from a Microsoft PDF) on the origins of CP 1252 and ISO-8859-1, another oft-used encoding:

[...] this comes from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft, which became ISO Standard 8859-1. However, in adding code points to the range reserved for control codes in the ISO standard, the Windows code page 1252 and subsequent Windows code pages originally based on the ISO 8859-x series deviated from ISO. To this day, it is not uncommon to have the development community, both within and outside of Microsoft, confuse the 8859-1 code page with Windows 1252, as well as see "ANSI" or "A" used to signify Windows code page support.

Answer 2

With PowerShell you can do something like this:

Get-Content IN.txt | Out-File -encoding ENC -filepath OUT.txt

While ENC is something like unicode, ascii, utf8, and utf32. Check out 'help out-file'.

To convert all the *.txt files in a directory to UTF-8, do something like this:

foreach($i in ls -name DIR/*.txt) { \
    Get-Content DIR/$i | \
    Out-File -encoding utf8 -filepath DIR2/$i \
}

which creates a converted version of each .txt file in DIR2.

To replace the files in all subdirectories, use:

foreach($i in ls -recurse -filter "*.java") {
    $temp = Get-Content $i.fullname
    Out-File -filepath $i.fullname -inputobject $temp -encoding utf8 -force
}

Answer 3

Oneliner using find, with automatic detection

The character encoding of all matching text files gets detected automatically and all matching text files are converted to UTF-8 encoding:

$ find . -type f -iname *.txt -exec sh -c 'iconv -f $(file -bi "$1" |sed -e "s/.*[ ]charset=//") -t utf-8 -o converted "$1" && mv converted "$1"' -- {} \;

To perform these steps, a sub shell sh is used with -exec, running a one-liner with the -c flag, and passing the filename as the positional argument "$1" with -- {}. In between, the UTF-8 output file is temporarily named converted.

The find command is very useful for such file management automation.

Click here for more find galore.

Answer 4

The Wikipedia page on newlines has a section on conversion utilities.

This seems your best bet for a conversion using only tools Windows ships with:

TYPE unix_file | FIND "" /V > dos_file

Answer 5

UTFCast is a Unicode converter for Windows which supports batch mode. I'm using the paid version and am quite comfortable with it.

UTFCast is a Unicode converter that lets you batch convert all text files to UTF encodings with just a click of your mouse. You can use it to convert a directory full of text files to UTF encodings including UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 to an output directory, while maintaining the directory structure of the original files. It doesn't even matter if your text file has a different extension, UTFCast can automatically detect text files and convert them.

Answer 6

There is free and open source batch encoding converter named CP Converter.

Answer 7

In my use case, I needed automatic input encoding detection and there there was a lot of files with Windows-1250 encoding, for which command file -bi <FILE> returns charset=unknown-8bit. This is not a valid parameter for iconv.

I have had the best results with enca.

Convert all files with txt extension to UTF-8

find . -type f -iname *.txt -exec sh -c 'echo "$1" && enca "$1" -x utf-8' -- {} \;

Answer 8

Use this Python script: https://github.com/goerz/convert_encoding.py It works on any platform. Requires Python 2.7.

Answer 9

iconv -f original_charset -t utf-8 originalfile > newfile

Run the above command in a for loop.

Answer 10

I made a tool for this finally: https://github.com/gonejack/transcode

Install:

go get -u github.com/gonejack/transcode

Usage:

> transcode source.txt
> transcode -s gbk -t utf8 source.txt

Answer 11

---------------Solution 1-----------------------------
There are two flaws in @akira 's answer.

1. Your original file would be zeroed if encountered any failure.
2. If your path contains any non-ASCII character, it will throw this error Set-Content : An object at the specified path ...txt does not exist, or has been filtered by the -Include or -Exclude parameter.

This is an improved version, by adding -LiteralPath and if($?)

foreach($i in ls -name *.txt) {
    $relativePath = Resolve-Path -Relative -LiteralPath "$i"
    $temp = Get-Content -LiteralPath "$relativePath" 
    if($?)
    {
        Out-File -LiteralPath "$i" -inputobject "$temp" -encoding utf8 -force
    }
}

----------------Solution 2 (Better)----------------
PowerShell can covert very limited encodings, such gb2312, Shift-JIS are not one of them. Notepad++ has a python plugin can do a better job than the powershell, and relatively safer, you can review what you are about to convert.

1. Use Everything find what file you want to convert. Download link is at below
   https://www.voidtools.com/
2. Notepad++ Menu -> Plugins -> Python Script -> New Scripts
3. Copy the one of two scripts(see bellow) and modify by your needs, save it to the default location.
4. Drag all files from Everything into notepad++
5. Run python-script with python-plugin in notepad++ from Menu -> Plugins -> Python Script -> Scripts
6. Done

There are two scripts, the bottom one can convert and save opened tabs into UTF-8

• Script 1
  https://gist.github.com/bjverde/88bbc418e79f016a57539c2d5043c445

• Script 2

for filename, bufferID, index, view in notepad.getFiles():
    console.write( filename + "\r\n")        
    notepad.activateIndex(view, index)       
    # UTF8 (without BOM)
    notepad.menuCommand(MENUCOMMAND.FORMAT_CONV2_AS_UTF_8)
    notepad.save()    
    notepad.reloadCurrentDocument()

Answer 12

ConvertZ is another Windows GUI tool for batch conversion

• Convert file (plain text) or clipboard content among the following encodings: big5, gbk, hz, shift-jis, jis, euc-jp, unicode big-endian, unicode little-endian, and utf-8.
• Batch files conversion
• Preview file content and converted result before actual conversion.
• Auto-update the charset in <Meta> tag, if specified in html docs.
• Auto-fix mis-mapped Big5/GBK characters after conversion.
• Change filename's encoding among big5, gbk, shift-jis and unicode.
• Convert MP3's ID3 or APE among big5, gbk, shift-jis, unicode and utf-8 encoding.
• Convert Ogg tag between Traditional and Simplified Chinese in utf-8.

Alternative download link: https://www.softking.com.tw/download/1763/

Answer 13

There is dos2unix on Unix. There was another similar tool for Windows (another reference is here).

How do I convert between Unix and Windows text files? has some more tricks.

Answer 14

I have created an online tool for that:

https://encoding-converter.netlify.app

You can upload bunch of files at once to be converted. Use it in this order:

1. enter the encodings
2. select/drag&drop your files

Upload will start automatically.