nkf ☆

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Description:
Network Kanji code conversion Filter (NKF)

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: encoding japanese text-processing conversion utility

Install: brew install nkf

About:
NKF (Network Kanji Filter) is a comprehensive character encoding converter primarily designed for Japanese text. It automatically detects and converts between various character encodings including ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, and UTF-8. The tool is particularly valuable for handling legacy Japanese text data and ensuring proper display across different systems.

Key Features:

Automatic encoding detection for Japanese text
Support for multiple encodings (ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, UTF-8)
MIME encoding/decoding capabilities
Line ending conversion
Robust handling of mixed encoding files

Use Cases:

Converting legacy Japanese text files to modern UTF-8 encoding
Processing email messages with Japanese character sets
Fixing mojibake (garbled text) in Japanese documents
Batch conversion of files for web publishing

Alternatives:

iconv – Standard Unix tool, less specialized for Japanese text detection
uconv – ICU-based converter, more heavyweight but supports more languages

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 10, 2025 6:43pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	325db2ec