Hello, readers of my blog
(what, there are no more readers? then I'll write it for myself)

From time to time, you need to extract some data from a "legacy windows file format" (In my case, it was a JET database). Often, the data is encoded using the (windows-specific) cp1256 encoding (or something similar), but the tool you use assumes cp1252 (or latin1, they are mostly compatible, unlike say cp1256 and iso-8859-6) and you end up with a text containing "arcane" latin characters like:

 ÇáÃáÝ ÊÃúáíÝåÇ ãä åãÒÉ æáÇã æÝÇÁ

While it should read

آ الألف تأْليفها من همزة ولام وفاء

Previously, I thought that after such (incorrect) conversions, it would be mostly damaged beyond repair But yesterday, as I met this problem again, I thought I could try to get something out of it (even if it is a bit broken), so I fired up ipython and after a few trials I found this:

f = file('file.in').read()
print >> open('file.out', "w"), f.decode('utf8').encode('latin1').decode('cp1256').encode('utf8')

and got the text in a readable form as you can see above. I hope someone finds this useful (by replacing cp1256 by some other encoding).