Changing file-type of a text file

olspookishmagus · 05-01-2006, 04:16 AM

Greetings, especially to the linuxquestions.org regulars.

Here is the story:

I downloaded a book which consisted of many text files, one file for each chapter, and saved them all in one directory. When I navigated to the folder using the Nautilus file manager, throught GNOME, when I double-clicked on the first chapter file CHAP1.TXT it did not open while the second chapter, and all others, open in the GEdit (the default GNOME text editor).

I opened a console window and when I tried to view the files using cat there were no obvious problem. Then I thought I should use the file command to see if there is any problem. And here follows the output:

Code:

olspookishmagus@debian-sarge:~/linux_guides/foo_book$ file CHAP1.TXT
CHAP1.TXT: ISO-8859 English text, with CRLF, CR line terminators
olspookishmagus@debian-sarge:~/linux_guides/foo_book$ file CHAP2.TXT
CHAP2.TXT: ASCII English text, with CRLF, CR line terminators

And here is the question:
How I could, if I can alter the filetype of CHAP1.TXT so that it can match the others plus I can open it with GEdit?

Thought, it is irrelevant here is my system set-up:
Debian 3.1 (Sarge), GNOME

I hope this is not an inappropriate section and
thanks in advance.

David the H. · 05-01-2006, 07:43 AM

No need to make it so difficult. You can open the file directly in a text editor, the only problem is that GNOME doesn't seem to recognize it as a text file, right? So what I would do is simply open it up in gedit or another editor (using file

pen) and save the contents to a new text file. If the new file is recognizable, problem solved.

Actually, even easier: 'cat CHAP1.TXT > CHAP1-fixed.TXT'.

olspookishmagus · 05-03-2006, 12:21 AM

Well, I tried both the approaches you suggested and there was little success as to achieve the desired result. A file whose file-type would match all the other files of the group, to be more accurate an ASCII English text, with CRLF, CR line terminators file.

Your second suggested approach, the one using cat while redirecting output to a new file did the same thing as if I had used a cp command, and allow me to explain myself. The following two commands seem that the do the same:

Code:

olspookishmagus@debian-sarge:~/linux_guides/foo_book$ cat CHAP1.TXT > CHAP1-FIXED.TXT
olspookishmagus@debian-sarge:~/linux_guides/foo_book$ cp CHAP1.TXT CHAP1-FIXED.TXT

As for the first suggested approach, it has some result but not the desired one. I used GEdit to open the file but when I saved the file it was now in an UTF-8 encoding/format.

Isn't there a way to make the desired file of an ASCII English text, with CRLF, CR line terminators filetype?
To what do these filetypes differ?

And, but of course, thanks for the answer!

David the H. · 05-03-2006, 01:00 AM

Ah, I missed the ascii part. I just thought it was a bad file or something. Because it's really odd that your system isn't recognizing file as text in the first place. iso-8859 is a perfectly legitimate text encoding, indeed probably the most common one out there. YOu might check your gnome file association settings and see if there's something not set right.

I don't know where it is in gedit, but most text editors have a character encoding option somewhere where you can select the encoding. The one I use, kwrite, has it. ISO-8859 and UTF-8 are both ascii compatible, so there shouldn't be too much trouble in translation. Your only problem might be some punctuation marks. There are also some command line tools, iconv for one, that can convert files to other encodings.

Actually, now that I think about it, I don't even know if there is a straight ascii choice. Nearly everyone uses UTF-8 or some form of ISO encoding these days.