Unable to change file encoding to utf-8

Question

I modified a UTF-8 encoded xml file using vi editor and saved it.

I'm on Redhat Linux 7.9

I checked the file encoding after the changes and found it to be us-ascii

file --mime-encoding tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xml
tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xml: us-ascii

I decided to change the encoding back to UTF-8 using the below command:

iconv -f us-ascii -t UTF-8 tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xml >tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xmlenc

echo $?
0

However, the encoding for the new file jdbc.xmlenc did not change to UTF-8 and remained unchanged. See the output below:

file --mime-encoding tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xmlenc
tmpfiles/08/config/jdbc/jdbc.xmlenc: us-ascii

Can you please suggest how can i change the file encoding to UTF-8?

Answer 1

It's going to be UTF-8 only if your document contains UTF-8 characters.

US-ASCII is a subset of UTF-8 thus any US-ASCII text is also a valid UTF-8 text. There's no need to convert anything.