chardet package is in gentoo-china-overlay layman -a gentoo-china I have already filed a chardet's bug, requesting it to be added to portage However, no response yet #! /usr/bin/python import sys,chardet,shutil,os,tempfile def convert(fname): fp = open(fname) text = fp.read() encoding = chardet.detect(text)['encoding'] rate = chardet.detect(text)['confidence'] if rate > 0.9 and not encoding == 'utf-8': tmp,tmpname=tempfile.mkstemp() os.write(tmp, unicode(text,encoding).encode('utf-8')) shutil.move(tmpname, fname) if __name__=="__main__": dir = sys.argv[1] for f in os.listdir(dir): pathname = os.path.join(dir, f) convert(pathname)