Question

I am trying to point iconv to a directory and all files will be converted UTF-8 regardless of the current encoding

I am using this script but you have to specify what encoding you are going FROM. How can I make it autdetect the current encoding?

dir_iconv.sh

#!/bin/bash

ICONVBIN='/usr/bin/iconv' # path to iconv binary

if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
  echo "$0 dir from_charset to_charset"
  exit
fi

for f in $1/*
do
  if test -f $f
  then
    echo -e "\nConverting $f"
    /bin/mv $f $f.old
    $ICONVBIN -f $2 -t $3 $f.old > $f
  else
    echo -e "\nSkipping $f - not a regular file";
  fi
done

terminal line

sudo convert/dir_iconv.sh convert/books CURRENT_ENCODING utf8

Answer 1

Maybe you are looking for enca:

Enca is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.

Currently it supports Belarusian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian, Chinese, and some multibyte encodings independently on language.

Note that in general, autodetection of current encoding is a difficult process (the same byte sequence can be correct text in multiple encodings). enca uses heuristics based on the language you tell it to detect (to limit the number of encodings). You can use enconv to convert text files to a single encoding.