title: Convert files between UTF-8 and ISO-8859 on Linux
body: <p>Every time that I get confronted with Unicode, nothing works. I'm on Linux, and I got these files from Windows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$file *
  file1: UTF-8 Unicode text
  file2: ISO-8859 text
  file3: ISO-8859 text
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Nothing was working until I found out that the files have different encodings. I want to make my life easy and have them all in the same format:</p>
  
  <pre><code>iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859 file1 &gt; test
  iconv: conversion to `ISO-8859' is not supported
  Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried to convert to ISO because that's only 1 conversion + when I open those ISO files in gedit, the German letter "ü" is displayed just fine. Okay, next try:</p>
  
  <pre><code>iconv -f ISO-8859 -t UTF-8 file2 &gt; test
  iconv: conversion from `ISO-8859' is not supported
  Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but obviously that didn't work.</p>