Hello, I think this should be an easy question; let me know if it's
not.  I have a data file from an old library cataloguing program
called VTLS with records for several thousand Western European books. 
The accents appear very strange on my computer; each one is two
characters.  èo is the code for ö, for instance; ðc is the code for ç.
 I could figure out what each individual combination corresponds to,
and do a search-and-replace, but I figure this is probably a
well-known problem in character encoding and perhaps there's even
conversion software that will do all the search-and-replaces in one
fell swoop?  Thanks.  If possible, I would also appreciate knowing
about any clear online explanation of different types of character
encoding, for my own knowledge.  Thank you!

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Clarification of Question by sidesway-ga on 29 Apr 2005 02:12 PDT

Thanks to vladimir-ga for that comment.  My question now becomes, is
there any software on the internet that converts MARC encoding to
ISO/Western European encoding?  Thanks.

Your files are probably in MARC format. It's a pretty old format used
by libraries. Modern versions of MARC use Unicode as the character
encoding, but before Unicode, MARC had its own encoding.

You can read more about MARC here:

http://www.loc.gov/marc/

And about the character encoding here:

http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/specchartables.html

There are tables showing which character means what, for example the
character that looks to you like a "è" is really a "combining
diaeresis", which means that it modifies the character that comes
after it. Similarly with the cedilla ("ç").

I'm pretty sure someone must have already written a converter from
MARC to (say) Unicode, but if you'd like to give it a try yourself,
these tables could be a starting point.

Hope this helps.