Format

cstocs [options] src_encoding dst_encoding [files ...]

Synopsis

cstocs il2 ascii < file | less
cstocs -i utf8 il2 file1 file2 file3
cstocs --help

Description

Cstocs is a simple conversion utility to change charset encoding of a text. It reads either specified files or (if none specified) the standard input, assumes that the input is encoded in src_encoding and ties to reencode it into dst_encoding. The result is written to the standard output.

Run cstocs without parameters to get short help and list of available encodings.

Characters that are not defined in src_encoding are passed to the output unchanged.

If source text contains character, that is defined in src_encoding but not in dst_encoding, it can be handled several ways. For example, character "e with caron" (symbol ecaron), and "d with caron" (symbol dcaron) are included in the iso-8859-2 encoding, but not in the iso-8859-1. If you will do reencoding of 8859-2 text to 8859-1, you may want to do one of the following actions:

1. Keep it the same, option
--nofillstring
2. Do not produce any output instead of "ecaron" symbol, option
--null
3. Substitute some string (possibly a space) instead of both ecaron and dcaron, options
--fillstring
4. Substitute a letter "d" instead of dcaron, and "e" instead of ecaron. It is even possible to substitute string instead of symbol, so you can replace the "AE" Latin character with string "AE" (letter "A", and letter "E"). Or you can replace a "plusminus sign" with a string "+/-". These substitutions are described in the
accent

Options

-i, -i.ext, --inplace.ext

Files specified will be converted in-place, using Perl -i facility. Optionaly, an extension for backup copies may be specified after dot. This parameter has to be the first one, if specified.

--dir directory

Encoding files are taken from directory instead of the default, which is Cz/Cstocs/enc in the Perl lib tree. The location of encoding files can also be changed using the CSTOCSDIR environment variable, but the --dir option has the highest priority.

--fillstring string

If source text contains character, that is defined in the src_encoding but not in the dst_encoding nor in the accent file (or accent file is not used), it is replaced by string. The default is single space.

--nofillstring

Disable changes of characters that would otherwise have fillstring applied. This is different from --null because that cancels that character out.

--null

Completely equivalent to --fillstring "".

--nochange or --noaccent

Do not use the accent file at all.

--onebyone

Use only those rules from the accent file, which rewrite one character to one character. If this option is specified, character "ecaron" will be rewritten to "e", but "AE" character will not be rewritten to "AE" string.

--onebymore

Use all rules from accent file. This is the default option.

See also

Cz::Cstocs(3).

Author

Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak has done the original Un*x implementation.

Jan Pazdziora, jpx (dash) perl (at) adelton (dot) com, created the Perl module version.