Hi I am trying to convert some log files from a Microsoft SQL server, but the files are encoded using UTf-16LE and iconv does not seem to be able to convert them.
I am doing:
iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 <filename> I also tried to delete any carriage returns from the end of the line if there are any, but that did not fix it either. If I save it using gedit that works, but this is not a viable solution since I have hundreds of those files.
EDIT: Please see the new answer for the missing option
I forgot the -o switch!
The final command is :
iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 <filename> -o <new-filename> 
iconv on macOS does not have the -o switch. This option is probably some POSIX extension.The command you specified will output to stdout. You can either use the -o parameter, or redirect your output:
with -o:
iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 infile -o outfile with piping:
iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 infile > outfile Both will yield the desired result.
However some versions of iconv (v1 on macOS for example) do not support the -o parameter and you will see that the converted text is echoed to stdout. In that case, use the piping option.
