title: Replacing German Umlauts in an ISO 8859-15 file on an UTF 8 system
body: <p>I have a bunch of CSV files that I read and plot with python and pandas.</p>
  
  <p>To add some more information about the file (or rather, the data it is about) into my plots, I am analyzing their headers, to extract various things from it (location of the measurement point, type of measurement etc.).</p>
  
  <p>Problem is - the files are in German and thus contain a lot of umlauts (ü, ö, ä). Now I can read and understand them perfectly fine, but my script can't.</p>
  
  <p>So I want to simply replace them with their valid 2 character representations (ü=ue, …), so that I dont have to worry about using things like <code>u'Ümlautstring'</code> or <code>\xfcstring</code> in python.</p>
  
  <pre><code>sed -i 's/\ä/ae/g' myfile.csv
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>should do the trick, according to google, but it doesnt work.</p>
  
  <p>With some further resarch, I found the issue, but no solution:</p>
  
  <p>My csv files are encoded in <code>ISO 8859-15</code>, but my <code>locale</code> is <code>LANG=de_DE.UTF-8</code>, which, as far as I understand it, means that sed searches for <code>ü</code> in its utf 8 form, which it will not find in ISO 8859-15.</p>
  
  <p>So what do I have to tell sed to find my umlauts? </p>
  
  <p>Most things I have found so far suggest Perl, but that is not really an option.</p>