Text file encoding

Detect the encoding of a text file:

$ file all.txt 
all.txt: ISO-8859 text

Get more verbosity:

$ file --mime all.txt 
all.txt: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Change the encoding of a text file:

iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=ISO-8859-2 file.txt >tmp.txt

_{This latter tip is from here.}

Update (20110918)
You can also use “chardet” for detecting charcter encoding. Usage:

$ chardet test.txt 
test.txt: utf-8 (confidence: 0.99)