---
name: "tcs"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "tcs"
version: "1-11.1"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/tcs"
---

# tcs(1)

translate character sets

## NAME

tcs - translate character sets

## SYNOPSIS

**tcs** \[ **-slcv** \] \[ **-f** *ics* \] \[ **-t** *ocs* \] \[ *file ...* \]

## DESCRIPTION

*Tcs* interprets the named *file(s)* (standard input default) as a stream of characters from the *ics* character set or format, converts them to runes, and then converts them into a stream of characters from the *ocs* character set or format on the standard output. The default value for *ics* and *ocs* is **utf**, the UTF encoding described in *utf*(6). The **-l** option lists the character sets known to *tcs*. Processing continues in the face of conversion errors (the **-s** option prevents reporting of these errors). The **-c** option forces the output to contain only correctly converted characters; otherwise, **0x80** characters will be substituted for UTF encoding errors and **0xFFFD** characters will substituted for unknown characters.

The **-v** option generates various diagnostic and summary information on standard error, or makes the **-l** output more verbose.

*Tcs* recognizes an ever changing list of character sets. In particular, it supports a variety of Russian and Japanese encodings. Some of the supported encodings are

- **utf**

  The Plan 9 UTF encoding, known by ISO as UTF-8

- **utf1**

  The deprecated original UTF encoding from ISO 10646

- **ascii**

  7-bit ASCII

- **8859-1**

  Latin-1 (Central European)

- **8859-2**

  Latin-2 (Czech .. Slovak)

- **8859-3**

  Latin-3 (Dutch .. Turkish)

- **8859-4**

  Latin-4 (Scandinavian)

- **8859-5**

  Part 5 (Cyrillic)

- **8859-6**

  Part 6 (Arabic)

- **8859-7**

  Part 7 (Greek)

- **8859-8**

  Part 8 (Hebrew)

- **8859-9**

  Latin-5 (Finnish .. Portuguese)

- **koi8**

  KOI-8 (GOST 19769-74)

- **jis-kanji**

  ISO 2022-JP

- **ujis**

  EUC-JX: JIS 0208

- **ms-kanji**

  Microsoft, or Shift-JIS

- **jis**

  (from only) guesses between ISO 2022-JP, EUC or Shift-Jis

- **gb**

  Chinese national standard (GB2312-80)

- **big5**

  Big 5 (HKU version)

- **unicode**

  Unicode Standard 1.0

- **tis**

  Thai character set plus ASCII (TIS 620-1986)

- **msdos**

  IBM PC: CP 437

- **atari**

  Atari-ST character set

## EXAMPLES

- **tcs -f 8859-1**

  Convert 8859-1 (Latin-1) characters into UTF format.

- **tcs -s -f jis**

  Convert characters encoded in one of several shift JIS encodings into UTF format. Unknown Kanji will be converted into **0xFFFD** characters.

- **tcs -lv**

  Print an up to date list of the supported character sets.

## SOURCE

**/sys/src/cmd/tcs**

## SEE ALSO

[*ascii*(1)](/ascii/1.md), *rune*(2), *utf*(6).