Arthur van Dorp <arthur_vd@gmx.net> writes: > Turned out that the umlauts got converted to \201 (ü) \204 (ä) and > \224 (ö) That looks like some `DOS code page' encoding like cp437 or cp850. If you can determine which, you can use `recode' or `iconv' to convert the files correctly (in case they contain other non-ASCII characters than the German ones).