reading souce code comments in Russian (?)

[Paul W.]

I've been trying to understand some pieces of code with comments that I guess are in Russian, but are rendered for me as mostly Latin-1 vowels with umlauts, accents, etc.

(It looks rather as though they're simultaneously Northern and Eastern European comments, but all the consonants have fled the region.)

I'm guessing that what's really going on is that they're in a special encoding of Cyrillic that maps Cyrillic characters to codes in 8-bit ASCII that aren't used in plain American ASCII, so that compilers and editors won't choke on them. (?)

Is that right, and if so, what's it called? I'd like to find a filter that de-weirds this so that I can run the comments through Google Translate.

[Bulat Ziganshin]

russian language used two 8-bit encodings - cp866 (DOS/OEM) and cp1251 (Windows/ANSI)

[nburns]

There's a standard utility for character set conversion called iconv. There's no automatic way to identify character sets that map onto 7-bit ASCII, but inconv can give you a list of options and you can try them until you find one that works.