(recode.info)Tutorial

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Quick Tutorial
**************

   So, really, you just are in a hurry to use `recode', and do not feel
like studying this manual?  Even reading this paragraph slows you down?
We might have a problem, as you will have to do some guess work, and
might not become very proficient unless you have a very solid
intuition....

   Let me use here, as a quick tutorial, an actual reply of mine to a
`recode' user, who writes:

     My situation is this--I occasionally get email with special
     characters in it.  Sometimes this mail is from a user using IBM
     software and sometimes it is a user using Mac software.  I myself
     am on a SPARC Solaris machine.

   Your situation is similar to mine, except that I _often_ receive
email needing recoding, that is, much more than _occasionally_!  The
usual recodings I do are Mac to Latin-1, IBM page codes to Latin-1,
Easy-French to Latin-1, remove Quoted-Printable, remove Base64.  These
are so frequent that I made myself a few two-keystroke Emacs commands
to filter the Emacs region.  This is very convenient for me.  I also
resort to many other email conversions, yet more rarely than the
frequent cases above.

     It _seems_ like this should be doable using `recode'.  However,
     when I try something like `grecode mac macfile.txt' I get nothing
     out--no error, no output, nothing.

   Presuming you are using some recent version of `recode', the command:

     recode mac macfile.txt

is a request for recoding `macfile.txt' over itself, overwriting the
original, from Macintosh usual character code and Macintosh end of
lines, to Latin-1 and Unix end of lines.  This is overwrite mode.  If
you want to use `recode' as a filter, which is probably what you need,
rather do:

     recode mac

and give your Macintosh file as standard input, you'll get the Latin-1
file on standard output.  The above command is an abbreviation for any
of:

     recode mac..
     recode mac..l1
     recode mac..Latin-1
     recode mac/CR..Latin-1/
     recode Macintosh..ISO_8859-1
     recode Macintosh/CR..ISO_8859-1/

   That is, a `CR' surface, encoding newlines with ASCII <CR>, is first
to be removed (this is a default surface for `mac'), then the Macintosh
charset is converted to Latin-1 and no surface is added to the result
(there is no default surface for `l1').  If you want `mac' code
converted, but you know that newlines are already coded the Unix way,
just do:

     recode mac/

the slash then overriding the default surface with empty, that is, none.
Here are other easy recipes:

     recode pc          to filter IBM-PC code and CR-LF (default) to Latin-1
     recode pc/         to filter IBM-PC code to Latin-1
     recode 850         to filter code page 850 and CR-LF (default) to Latin-1
     recode 850/        to filter code page 850 to Latin-1
     recode /qp         to remove quoted printable

   The last one is indeed equivalent to any of:

     recode /qp..
     recode l1/qp..l1/
     recode ISO_8859-1/Quoted-Printable..ISO_8859-1/

   Here are some reverse recipes:

     recode ..mac       to filter Latin-1 to Macintosh code and CR (default)
     recode ..mac/      to filter Latin-1 to Macintosh code
     recode ..pc        to filter Latin-1 to IBM-PC code and CR-LF (default)
     recode ..pc/       to filter Latin-1 to IBM-PC code
     recode ..850       to filter Latin-1 to code page 850 and CR-LF (default)
     recode ..850/      to filter Latin-1 to code page 850
     recode ../qp       to force quoted printable

   In all the above calls, replace `recode' by `recode -f' if you want
to proceed despite recoding errors.  If you do not use `-f' and there
is an error, the recoding output will be interrupted after first error
in filter mode, or the file will not be replaced by a recoded copy in
overwrite mode.

   You may use `recode -l' to get a list of available charsets and
surfaces, and `recode --help' to get a quick summary of options.  The
above output is meant for those having already read this manual, so let
me dare a suggestion: why could not you find a few more minutes in your
schedule to peek further down, right into the following chapters!