utf 8 - Windows-1252 to UTF-8 encoding

Question

I've copied certain files from a Windows machine to a Linux machine. So all the Windows encoded (windows-1252) files need to be converted to UTF-8. The files which are already in UTF-8 should not be changed. I'm planning to use the recode utility for that. How can I specify that the recode utility should only convert windows-1252 encoded files and not the UTF-8 files?

Example usage of recode:

recode windows-1252.. myfile.txt

This would convert myfile.txt from windows-1252 to UTF-8. Before doing this, I would like to know that myfile.txt is actually windows-1252 encoded and not UTF-8 encoded. Otherwise, I believe this would corrupt the file.

Answer 1

iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t UTF-8 filename.txt