How to determine and convert text file encoding (file, enca, iconv)
Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 1 min read • 67 wordsTo determine the file type of the file “sample.txt” you just type:file sample.txtUsually it’ll tell you only that it is a text file.
file sample.txtUsually it’ll tell you only that it is a text file. To get to know more about the encoding type:enca -L none sample.textThe -L switch tells the program what language is used in the file. If you don’t know, just use none.To convert the encoding from ISO-8859-1 (latin1) to UTF-8:iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 sample_iso8859-1.txt > sample_utf-8.txt