Hi,

I have tonnes of .txt files that are written in French. I need to replace the French special characters, however, with English equivalents (e.g. é -> e and ç -> c).

I have tried this

---

#!/bin/bash
# Convert French characters to normal characters

# Treat each of the files

exec 3<&0
exec 0<frenchCharacters.txt

while read currentFrenchCharacter
do
read currentReplacementCharacter
sed -e "s/$currentFrenchCharacter/$currentReplacementCharacter/g" $1 > $1.frenchCharactersReplaced
mv $1.frenchCharactersReplaced $1
done

# Close the file
exec 3<&0

---

where "frenchCharacters.txt" contains a list of characters, where the first is the character to find and the second is the character to replace it with.

The problem is that it doesn't make any changes to the file that I send in (stored in $1). Anyone know why? Also, anyone know of a better way to do this?

I don't think you can do it with the sed function. sed will try to replace condition1 with condition2; does not lend itself to checking inside a listing as you were starting to program.

I used the tr function below. You will need to know the octal values of the characters for your fontset.

No magic tool. Just sed:
If you want sed to change our file "inline" just add the -i switch.

But be carefull: no way back.

My copy of sed supports y//; is that a GNU extension? Seems tailor-made for the problem.

Well, yes. And it's even more elegant:

The in-place switch -i will create a backup of the original file with a .bk extension.