html doc transformed to binary

radiodee1 · 01-09-2007, 08:15 AM

I'm running Debian Etch. I've installed apache2 and have setup a website on the localhost ip address. I'll never really go online. I had apache setup the same way on my windows partition before I had linux, and since then I have been moving files from the old site to the new site.

There is one page that displays wrong. Apache2 shows it as normal letters with lots of spaces in between them, though you cannot read them. When firefox is told to show the page wihtout the server ("open file...") the page comes up fine. When I look at the page with vim the contents are correct, but gedit and kate cannot display the page right. Gedit complains the page is in the wrong character encoding (not UTF-8?), and kate says the page is a binary. Kate ultimately shows the file with a space after every letter. If I "cat" the file I can see it, but "less" says the file may be binary and shows junk on the screen. How do I get my document back?

pwc101 · 01-09-2007, 08:48 AM

If cat is displaying it correctly, try

Code:

cat yourfilename > yournewfilename

radiodee1 · 01-09-2007, 10:41 AM

I try

Code:

cat general.html > general.html2
rm general.html
cp general.html2 general.html

but the browser, when going through apache2, can't display it. Gedit won't display it either. I can still look at it with vim. Any ideas?

pwc101 · 01-09-2007, 10:46 AM

Try

Code:

file general.html

to see what kind of file it is... it may shed some light on this problem. Otherwise, can't you just open it in vim, copy all the contents and then paste them into a new file?

nx5000 · 01-09-2007, 10:51 AM

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF8 general.html > general_utf8.html

You may have to download iconv and also modify the -f ISO-8859-1 which is the current encoding of the file (eventhough it works as is in lots of case)

radiodee1 · 01-09-2007, 11:56 AM

I type

Code:

iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 general.html > general_utf8.html
cp general_utf8.html general.html

I can still look at general_utf8.html, but apache2 still won't show it. The "file" command has improved. Before it said nothing after the word "general.html".

Quote:

file general_utf8.html
general_utf8.html: data

Do I have the right encodings? Where do I see what they are? "iconv -l" just gives a list.

EDIT: after the "iconv" command, I can still see the file with "cat" but no longer with "vim". The file opens up, but every other character is unreadable... mostly blue carrot (^) and blue ampersand (@)...

nx5000 · 01-09-2007, 12:29 PM

First, what says:
locale

Blue ampersand? humm then the conversion failed or your machine is not in utf8 (result of locale is the minimum)

You have to know which encoding is for this original file (I have no clue how to know this, the only way I do it is with od -x filename )
If you are in a hurry, use the mouse as someone said

radiodee1 · 01-10-2007, 06:36 AM

In the end I used "cat" to display the file (a version of the file I had saved from before I used "iconv") and I copied and pasted the contents into another text editor. The file was too long for the xterm memory, (even when I had scrolled all the way to the top there was still stuff missing from the beginning of the file) so I had to do part of it in pieces from "vim". Thanks pwc101. Thanks everyone for the advice.