I’ve been looking for a software tool that would convert foreign characters into a poor substitute.<\/p>\n
Call me Ugly McAmerican. I don’t care.<\/p>\n
My language has been worn down — I would say, “polished” — like a river rock to the point where it doesn’t have a million characters or funny accent marks or any of that stuff. Now, I don’t mind if your language uses them. I don’t even mind if we have a common encoding. What I do mind is that none of my tools work with your stupid common encoding. When grep<\/em> and sed<\/em> and diff<\/em> and ruby<\/em> all know what to do with your ?q???????, give me a call.<\/p>\n In the meantime, I plan to go on working in ASCII<\/a> as much as possible. Then, when necessary, I’ll use tools to convert ugly-quotes to pretty ones, or turn On the Mac, TextWrangler<\/em> is one of those tools. It will convert UTF-8<\/a> and Latin-1<\/a> text files to ASCII. (It will also convert smart quotes to stupid, and vice-versa.)<\/p>\n Sadly, I don’t have anything to do that on my Linux machine.<\/p>\n Well, I didn’t. But I do now. In fact, I had it all along, because iconv<\/em> can do it.<\/p>\n What iconv<\/em> does is translate from one character encoding to another. For example, you can use it to convert from ASCII to ISO Latin-1 to UTF-8. That would be a boring conversion, but the reverse is not true: an ASCII e<\/strong> is still an e<\/strong> in UTF-8, but a UTF-8 \u00c3\u00a9<\/strong> isn’t necessarily going to be an ASCII e<\/strong>.<\/p>\n...<\/code> into ellipses, etc.<\/p>\n