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[KIE18]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Please do not post copyrighted ebooks to MobileRead. There are scrambling plugins that can be used if the structure of entire copyrighted epubs needs to be shared.

This book is distributed free of charge by the publisher. From there I downloaded it.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Just extract the book as a single HTML file, then convert it to CP1252, then open it as CP1251 and save as UTF-8. There are many editors that can to that, including Notepad++ and VSCode.

How to extract a book in one HTML file? If you rename it to zip, then there are a lot of separate files.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KIE18

This book is distributed free of charge by the publisher. From there I downloaded it.

"Free of charge" does not equal "no copyright." Unless you are the rights holder (like the publisher you got it from), you are not free to redistribute copyrighted material.

Also... we're pretty far from this being a Sigil issue at this point. Time to wrap it up.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

"Free of charge" does not equal "no copyright." Unless you are the rights holder (like the publisher you got it from), you are not free to redistribute copyrighted material.

Also... we're pretty far from this being a Sigil issue at this point. Time to wrap it up.

I know this is not a sigil issue. I was hoping that someone here would help me solve the problem with the book.

[JSWolf]

Why are we still getting convoluted ways to convert to UTF-8 when I've already given a very simple solution?

[isarl]

Originally Posted by KIE18

I know this is not a sigil issue. I was hoping that someone here would help me solve the problem with the book.

If you are on Linux then the iconv utility is likely already installed for you and can perform character encoding conversions. An outline of the process would probably be something like:

1. Explode/unzip your ebook into a temporary directory.

2. For each file in the temporary directory which has the wrong encoding, convert it to UTF-8. NOTE: if you are not careful about which encodings you use, iconv can introduce more encoding errors. Example follows. Note that the curly quotes I use are UTF-8 encoded characters; after running the echo command, “example” is UTF-8 encoded.

# This example demonstrates an encoding error! Be careful not to do this by mistake.
$ echo '“Hello, world!”' >example
$ iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 example
“Hello, world!â€iconv: illegal input sequence at position 18

Here is some bash-like shell code that might work, if you have chardetect available (on my system, this executable is provided by the python-chardet package):

for file in $(find . -type f) ; do
    if [[ $(chardetect "$file" --minimal) == "Windows-1252" ]] ; then
        iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 "$f" -o "$f.utf8"
        mv "$f.utf8" "$f"
    fi
done

3. Zip your book back up.

Character encodings can be a pain in the butt. I hope this helps.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why are we still getting convoluted ways to convert to UTF-8 when I've already given a very simple solution?

I haven't tested the Modify Epub plugin for this purpose myself, and I don't have any convenient ebooks to test it with, but I do see the option you mention. The hover text says that it “removes any existing charset tags on html pages and encodes in UTF-8”. OP's charset tags already say that the content is UTF-8, so the question in my mind which I would want to test out before relying on this feature is, how does Modify Epub detect the origin encoding? If it takes the original charset tag as gospel then it will get this wrong. If it does get it right somehow, then your solution will be much more convenient than the loop I gave above.

[DiapDealer]

I think calibre's python includes the chardet module (or its own subclassed version thereof). I would suspect that the Modify Epub plugin uses that to determine (through multiple confidence-based checks) the original encoding.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why are we still getting convoluted ways to convert to UTF-8 when I've already given a very simple solution?

Jon, did you actually try this? The solution you gave works if the epub is encoded in utf-8 but is not declared to be in utf-8. It will not convert code page 1251 to utf-8 which is what I think the OP wants to do. Especially not since the original epub has encoding="utf-8" declared.

I do have some curiosity about how InDesign was used to generate this dog's breakfast but no quick and easy solutions come to mind.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by isarl

for file in $(find . -type f) ; do
    if [[ $(chardetect "$file" --minimal) == "Windows-1252" ]] ; then
        iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 "$f" -o "$f.utf8"
        mv "$f.utf8" "$f"
    fi
done

The more I look at this, the more I worry that it might break if your filenames have a space character in them or something. It might be better to use find's -execdir option instead. Maybe something like:

read -r -d '' bash_script <<'EOF'
if [[ $(chardetect "{}" --minimal) == "Windows-1252" ]] ; then
    iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 "{}" -o "{}.utf8"
    mv "{}.utf8" "{}"
fi
EOF
find . -type f -execdir bash -c "$bash_script" ';'

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by isarl

If you are on Linux then the iconv utility is likely already installed for you and can perform character encoding conversions. An outline of the process would probably be something like:

1. Explode/unzip your ebook into a temporary directory.

2. For each file in the temporary directory which has the wrong encoding, convert it to UTF-8. NOTE: if you are not careful about which encodings you use, iconv can introduce more encoding errors. Example follows. Note that the curly quotes I use are UTF-8 encoded characters; after running the echo command, “example” is UTF-8 encoded.

# This example demonstrates an encoding error! Be careful not to do this by mistake.
$ echo '“Hello, world!”' >example
$ iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 example
“Hello, world!â€iconv: illegal input sequence at position 18

Here is some bash-like shell code that might work, if you have chardetect available (on my system, this executable is provided by the python-chardet package):

for file in $(find . -type f) ; do
    if [[ $(chardetect "$file" --minimal) == "Windows-1252" ]] ; then
        iconv -f cp1252 -t utf-8 "$f" -o "$f.utf8"
        mv "$f.utf8" "$f"
    fi
done

3. Zip your book back up.

Character encodings can be a pain in the butt. I hope this helps.

I am using windows 10.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by KIE18

How to extract a book in one HTML file?

You can merge them first.

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I do have some curiosity about how InDesign was used to generate this dog's breakfast

It must be an old Type-1 converted font with wrong glyph names.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by KIE18

I am using windows 10.

GnuWin32 seems to provide iconv for Windows. As for the logic to test whether a file is CP1252 before trying to convert it, I leave that to you. I have already done 95% of the work for you.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by isarl

GnuWin32 seems to provide iconv for Windows. As for the logic to test whether a file is CP1252 before trying to convert it, I leave that to you. I have already done 95% of the work for you.

I am not a programmer and do not work in IT. Working with code is space for me. I don't understand your recommendations.
Is there an easy way that even a child can handle?