Windows-1252 to UTF-8 encoding
character-encoding, data-conversion, encoding, utf-8, windows-1252
Solution
How would you expect recode to know that a file is Windows-1252? In theory, I believe any file is a valid Windows-1252 file, as it maps every possible byte to a character.
Now there are certainly characteristics which would strongly suggest that it's UTF-8 - if it starts with the UTF-8 BOM, for example - but they wouldn't be definitive.
One option would be to detect whether it's actually a completely valid UTF-8 file first, I suppose... again, that would only be suggestive.
I'm not familiar with the recode tool itself, but you might want to see whether it's capable of recoding a file from and to the same encoding - if you do this with an invalid file (i.e. one which contains invalid UTF-8 byte sequences) it may well convert the invalid sequences into question marks or something similar. At that point you could detect that a file is valid UTF-8 by recoding it to UTF-8 and seeing whether the input and output are identical.
Alternatively, do this programmatically rather than using the recode utility - it would be quite straightforward in C#, for example.
Just to reiterate though: all of this is heuristic. If you really don't know the encoding of a file, nothing is going to tell you it with 100% accuracy.
Problem
I've copied certain files from a Windows machine to a Linux machine. All the files encoded with Windows-1252 need to be converted to UTF-8. The files which are already in UTF-8 should not be changed. I'm planning to use the `recode` utility for that. How can I specify that the `recode` utility should only convert windows-1252 encoded files and not the UTF-8 files? Example usage of recode: ``` recode windows-1252.. myfile.txt ``` This would convert `myfile.txt` from windows-1252 to UTF-8. Before doing this, I would like to know that `myfile.txt` is actually windows-1252 encoded and not UTF-8 encoded. Otherwise, I believe this would corrupt the file.