best way to make all my txt files utf-8 encoded?

Ole · February 25, 2012, 9:30am

Subject says it all, really, I’m gonna use emacs instead of text edit for all my txt file editing so I want utf-8 encoding to avoid any compatibility issues. I have a lot (like >10k) txt files so this will have to be automated. What’s the best approach to this? Could I use applescript? (I have set my default save option to utf 8 now, does that mean opening and reserving a file with a different encoding makes it utf8?)

alastor933 · February 25, 2012, 4:23pm

Of course! This might help.

DJ_Bazzie_Wazzie · February 25, 2012, 4:53pm

If you’re already familliar with unix then I should consider using iconv… iconv is ‘the’ encoding tool to use.

Ole · February 25, 2012, 6:34pm

Thanks. I’ll check out iconv. Btw, Your link doesn’t work for me, alastor. Maybe you could edit it?

alastor933 · February 25, 2012, 7:23pm

Oops…
Here it is.

DJ_Bazzie_Wazzie · February 25, 2012, 10:16pm

NOTE: Those text manipulations are old and some of them are outdated and became incorrect.

One of the most important things are that in the shell and AppleScript itself has changed it’s default encodings. Also those examples uses ASCII Numbers and ASCII character classes while it should use string id’s.