I'm trying to work out how to convert a file to UTF-8, but I really can't find much useful info on google other than to use iconv. I downloaded that, but when I ran it via the CLI it told me that I hadn't installed it properly. The file I'm trying to handle is a rather large file (5M lines).
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3 Answers
Notepad++ provides an easy (manual) way to do it. Open your file, choose "Encoding > Convert to UTF-8", and save. I think the size limit is 2 GB.
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Ok, I just tried this but it choked on a 889MB file & I've read other reports that it couldn't even open much smaller files & hence I'm still looking. :(– BrettCommented May 30, 2011 at 19:40
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Perhaps rotatingscrew.com/utfcast.aspx or unicodetools.com/unicode/utf8-to-latin-converter.php might work? Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:49
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Nope.... first one said "error" when I tred to run my file & didn't say why & second one I really don't think it's a good idea to paste 5M lines into a web form. ;)– BrettCommented May 30, 2011 at 21:15
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Keep Googling? Here's another one: sourceforge.net/projects/iconvnet Commented May 30, 2011 at 21:18
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I'll try that... but yes, I have been looking. Tried another but seemed like it loaded the file into memory or something as Windows had to increase the size of my paging file & closing all my programs to reboot took forever.– BrettCommented May 30, 2011 at 21:31
Well, you can just use iconv. You can for example download a Setup.exe from GnuWin32, that should just work (TM).
Also see the question Batch-convert files for encoding or line ending which describes how to convert using the command line on Windows.
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No matter what I do I cannot seem to get iconv working & it keeps complaining about needing intl.dll– BrettCommented May 30, 2011 at 19:42
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libintl.dllcan be found here: gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libintl.htm, just putlibintl.dllinto the same directory asiconv.exe.– BenCommented Aug 29, 2014 at 18:05 -
I think gnuwin32.sourceforge.net is meanwhile a bit outdated. Modern alternative would be cmder Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 8:44
One option is to download Cygwin. Cygwin lets you use the Linux command line from within Windows. One advantage of using Cygwin is you don't have to worry about adding a program to the PATH as you would if you used the Windows command line. So download Cygwin and be sure to search for and select the iconv tool in your download. Then you can follow the example at this StackOverflow question. For instance it says,
iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-15 in.txt > out.txt
where UTF-8 is the starting encoding of in.txt and ISO-8859-15 is the output you'd like out.txt to be.
