Batch convert latin-1 files to utf-8 using iconv

Question

I'm having this one PHP project on my OSX which is in latin1 -encoding. Now I need to convert files to UTF8. I'm not much a shell coder and I tried something I found from internet:

mkdir new  
for a in `ls -R *`; do iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 <"$a" >new/"$a" ; done

But that does not create the directory structure and it gives me heck load of errors when run. Can anyone come up with neat solution?

Answer 1

You shouldn't use ls like that and a for loop is not appropriate either. Also, the destination directory should be outside the source directory.

mkdir /path/to/destination
find . -type f -exec iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 "{}" -o /path/to/destination/"{}" \;

No need for a loop. The -type f option includes files and excludes directories.

Edit:

The OS X version of iconv doesn't have the -o option. Try this:

find . -type f -exec bash -c 'iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 "{}" > /path/to/destination/"{}"' \;