NAME
fix_latin - filters a data stream that is predominantly utf8 and 'fixes' any latin (ie: non-ASCII 8 bit) characters
SYNOPSIS
fix_latin options <input_file >output_file
Options:
-? detailed help messageDESCRIPTION
The script acts as a filter, taking source data which may contain a mix of ASCII, UTF8, ISO8859-1 and CP1252 characters, and producing output will be all ASCII/UTF8.
Multi-byte UTF8 characters will be passed through unchanged (although over-long UTF8 byte sequences will be converted to the shortest normal form). Single byte characters will be converted as follows:
0x00 - 0x7F ASCII - passed through unchanged
0x80 - 0x9F Converted to UTF8 using CP1252 mappings
0xA0 - 0xFF Converted to UTF8 using Latin-1 mappingsOPTIONS
EXAMPLES
This script was originally written to assist in converting a Postgres database from SQL-ASCII encoding to UNICODE UTF8 encoding. The following examples illustrate its use in that context.
If you have a SQL format dump file that you would normally restore by piping into 'psql', you can simply filter the dump file through this script:
fix_latin < dump_file | psql -d databaseIf you have a compressed dump file that you would normally restore using 'pg_restore', you can omit the '-d' option on pg_restore and pipe the resulting SQL through this script and into psql:
pg_restore -O dump_file | fix_latin | psql -d databaseTo take a look at non-ASCII lines in the dump file:
perl -ne '/^COPY (\S+)/ and $t = $1; print "$t:$_" if /[^\x00-\x7F]/' dump_fileSEE ALSO
This script is implemented using the Encoding::FixLatin Perl module. For more details see the module documentation with the command:
perldoc Encoding::FixLatinIn particular you should read the 'LIMITATIONS' section to understand the circumstances under which data corruption might occur.
COPYRIGHT & LICENSE
Copyright 2009-2010 Grant McLean <grantm at cpan.org>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.