Encoding – How to Read ANSI Encoded Files Correctly

ansiarabicencodingutf-8

I have some files that Ubuntu can't read it ( ANSI encoding ) but Windows can read it well.

When I open it in gedit or notepad++ it seems like this :

Êã ÇáÊÍæíá áÜÜ

How can I make Ubuntu read ANSI encoded files well?

Best Answer

ANSI means more or less nothing --- the most probable candidate for your encoding is Windows-1252. You can convert the file with 

iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t utf8 < filein.txt > fileout.txt

but remember, most encodings (read the linked article if you are not sure about what that mean) can't be reliably guessed, so you need to know the exact encoding to give sense to your data.

From the comments it seems that you are most probably looking for some Arabic encoding --- in that case check WINDOWS-1256.

The list of available encodings for iconv is on github, or you can find it with the command 

iconv --list

Notice that just at the start of the list there are a bunch of "ANSI"-like encodings.

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