batch re-encode windows encoded .txt files to UTF-8 on the MacOS command line

re-encode-txt-howto.md

Re-encode all .txt files in a directory from windows-1252 to utf-8 in place

• using find and iconf commands on osx
• replaces original files!
• two-step process:
  • first store all paths to text files in a separate file
  • then do conversion based on each file path
  • why? find -exec with iconv was too hard to figure out on macOS

1:

find . -type f -iname "*.txt" > list.ls

2:

cat list.ls | while read line; do cat $line | iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t UTF-8 > tmp; mv tmp $line; done