Issue: Decoding a file on linux machine from command line

Question

I have some French codepoints that i would like to decode to utf-8 on a Linux System. The content of my file is (little example):

Lemari%C3%A9%20

Which decoded should be: Lemarié

I read that iconv is a great tool for achieving this but i dont know what i should use as -f argument, because the file content is encoded, so am only trying with the -t option without success: iconv -t UTF8 test.csv

Any advice?

Answer 1

From the man page, following is the command to convert input from ISO88592 encoding format to UTF8 encoding format. output would be the output.txt file.

iconv -f ISO88592 -t UTF8 < input.txt > output.txt

So in your case, -f should be used with the encoding format of the input file. Like

iconv -f <input file encoding format> -t UTF8 < test.csv > output.txt