Posts Tagged ‘iconv’

To Lumier with a bike the yesterday “action”

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Saturday was quite shaking. The morning start yearly around 8:30.Anton a friend of mine for whom I am working and for whom I am admining twoservers. Called yearly in the morning and informed me that winner.bg is not working for several hours. I logged on the server and tried to see what’s wrong.It seemed that the whole MySQL was quite messy. It even refuses to start.There were corrupted data the system seemed to be restarted twice.I won’t enter into much details here just put some moral mostly.I was desperate things looked like everything was lost. The old sqlbackups made by the automated script I use were completely useless causethey were dumped with characterset latin1 …. So everything which was in cp1251appeared like “?” questionmarks. I thought there was encoding problem and the problem might be solved with iconv, however unfortunately that was not the case.The dumps were completely useless. So as a prescription if you use cp1251 or koi8r or any cyrillic encoding and you’ve explicitly definition in /etc/my.cnfoutlining that be sure not to dump with –default-character-set=latin1 ! Never ever! do this. At a moment I felt completely forgotten by God doubt came along for a second, nevertheless I started praying even though only with hope and without faith enough I screamed “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Blessed God, have mercy on me the sinner!”. Eventually until 16:45 most of the problems were fixed. Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! I could see one more time clearly God fixing things for me. To be honest I was so messed at a poing before all came to its place that I was not knowing exactly what I am doing. I followed a couple of steps one of which was completely unsinstall the mysql server and exchange it with 5.0.75 from 5.0.65. I had to switch to innodb recovery mode level 4 and dump some of the databases and import them back. A lot of the databases I simply copied in binary format to the newly created sql server. The sql server started working again ! Blessed be God My helped and refugee! I did some shopping on Saturday 5:30 ’till 18:00. Then I tried to recover the databaess with the screwed cyrillic letters. I had to contact ganchev “shudder” a friend of mine who is pretty good in coding and worked at the same company I did for some years. He couldn’t help however he advised me to check the dumps with hexdump -C and see if the “?” questionmarks are questionmarks. In my case they were so the backups were completely useless. I was lucky that one of the database my friend Tony has backed up and the other one was for a website who was started just a few days before so data there could be recovered with a little effort and it’s not gonna be so fatal I guess. Later on during the evening I updated a couple of services like apache php eaccelerator and so on on the two freebsd servers I take care for. On the Sunday morning I had to fix a little thing a consequence from the nightly update. The php5-gd port didn’t upgraded with the portupgrade -ri cause according to portaudit it has a security flaw. However quite flashy and luckily I fixed the problem. The rest of the Sunday I spend in talks with Paco, then we went to Sali and went to Lumiere the coffee restaurant where Sali managed to arrange work for Papi. The idea of us going there was to negotiate if possible to increase Papi’s daily sallary cause today he receives only 20 EUR per day for 10 hours of work. We went to Lumiere with Bikes that Sali gave us. On our way Papi fall off his bike and hurt his leg badly … 🙁 We went there and drinked coffee, thanks God they didn’t charged me for the coffee because the restaurant owners (Aidyn and Tazira) said the coffee I don’t need to pay for. After that we went back home we had small argue with Papi for which I deeply regret. I should thanks God for granting me from his divine mercy and doing so much for me the sinner. Quite in a few minutes I’ll be praying a bit and going to bed. Let’s hope that the Lord will be blessing me and helping me in my work and studies in the coming week just like he did so far. Just to conclude my post. Glory be to you Almighty and all merciful Lord my stronghold and my refugee! Hallelujah!END—–

How to convert UTF-8 encoding files to Windows CP1251 on GNU / Linux

Friday, October 21st, 2011

I needed to convert a file which had a Bulgarian text written in UTF-8 encoding to Windows CP1251 in order to fix a website encoding problems after a move of the website from one physical server to another.

I tried first with enca( detects and convert encoding of text files from one encoding to another).

The exact way I tried to convert was:

linux:~# enca -L bg /home/site/www/includes/utf8_encoded_file.php
...
Unfortunately this attempt to conver was unsucesfully, and the second logical guess was to use iconvConvert encoding of given files from one encoding to another to do the utf8 to cp1251 conversion.
I reached for some help in irc.freenode.net, #varnalab channel and Alex Kuklin helped me, giving me an example command line to do the conversion.
iconv winedows to cp1251 conversion line, he pointed to me was:

linux:~# iconv -f utf8 -t cp1251 < in > out

Further on I adapted Alex’s example to convert my utf8_encoded_file.php encoded Bulgarian characted to CP1251 and used the following commands to convert and create backups of my original UTF8 file:

linux:~# cd /home/site/www/includes
linux:/home/site/www/includes# iconv -f utf8 -t cp1251 < utf8_encoded_file.php in > utf8_encoded_file.php.cp1251
linux:/home/site/www/includes# mv utf8_encoded_file.php utf8_encoded_file.php.bak
linux:/home/site/www/includes# mv utf8_encoded_file.php.cp1251 utf8_encoded_file.php