c++ read from binary file and convert to utf-8

Question

I would like to read data from a application/octet-stream charset=binary file with fread on linux and convert it to UTF-8 encoding. I tried with iconv , but it doesn't support binary charset. I haven't found any solution yet. Can anyone help me with it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

According to the MIME that you've given, you're reading data that's in non-textual binary format. You cannot convert it with iconv or similar, because it's meant for converting text from one (textual) encoding to another. If your data is not textual, then a conversion to any character encoding is meaningless and will just corrupt the data, but not make it any more readable.

The typical way to present binary as readable text for inspection is hex dump . There's an existing answer for implementing it in c++: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16804835/2079303