Which of the following commands can be used to convert text files in one character encoding to another character encoding?

The correct answer is D. iconv. iconv (option D) is the standard Unix/Linux utility for converting text files between character encodings - for example, iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 input.txt > output.txt converts from UTF-8 to Latin-1. The distractors are wrong for these reasons: cat simply concatenates and…

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Question

Which of the following commands can be used to convert text files in one character encoding to another character encoding?

Options

Acat
Bconvert
Cdd
Diconv
Eutf2utf

How the community answered

(28 responses)

B
4% (1)
C
4% (1)
D
86% (24)
E
7% (2)

Explanation

iconv (option D) is the standard Unix/Linux utility for converting text files between character encodings - for example, iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 input.txt > output.txt converts from UTF-8 to Latin-1.

The distractors are wrong for these reasons:

cat simply concatenates and displays files, with no encoding awareness
convert is an ImageMagick tool for image format conversion, not text encoding
dd copies raw bytes and can manipulate block sizes, but has no concept of character encodings
utf2utf is not a standard utility found in common Linux distributions; it does not exist as a real command

Memory tip: Think of iconv as "international convert" - the i hints at internationalization (i18n), which is exactly what character encoding conversion supports.

Topics

#character encoding#text conversion#iconv#locale

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