Converting ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8

Detecting encodings and converting them with CLI tools

Published

Go doesn’t automatically transform content in the other encodings. You need to check your inputs and the way I’m doing it is like so.

Detect encoding of a file

$ uchardet data.txt
ISO-8859-1
$ file data.txt
data.txt: ISO-8859 text

Converting ISO-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8

curl -s http://maps.natalian.org/data.txt | iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 > data.txt