convert whole website from iso-8859-2/1 to utf-8

[Miroslav Rovis]

The files all have either:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2">
if in Croatian and
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
if in English or Italian, just as they're supposed to.

The iso-8859-2 files gave much resistance and broke a few nerves here at 
my desktop and around...
Until that is, I found:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2003-09/msg00467.html
(
> prefer-coding-system utf-8
> C-x C-f filename
After these two lines, what does Emacs print if you say
  M-: buffer-file-coding-system RET
?
)
Mine said iso-latin-1-dos instead of iso-latin-2-dos (pages made long 
ago, in the days mule wasn't yet an option for simple Emacs users... and 
Linux was truly hard to understand as well; now I do use it much better...)
So, as per:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2002-09/msg00181.html
I set:
(add-hook 'find-file-hooks
          '(lambda ()
             (if (equal buffer-file-coding-system 'iso-latin-2)
                 (set-language-environment "Latin-2"))))
in my .emacs file
But I am not certain that worked for me though...

Therefore I also made sure I learned to just
M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system RET
to
latin-2

in case it read -1(DOS)--
instead of -2(DOS)-- in the modeline (at the very left)

Surely now:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2004-06/msg00508.html
(Perhaps it is easiest to tell Emacs to save as UTF-8, by doing C-x
RET f utf-8 RET.)
the advice above worked fine.

(There was just no way to get it right when the 
buffer-file-coding-system variable was set to latin-1, the "meta ... 
charset=iso-8859-2" in the head of the html file made no difference.)

But, going manually is not an option, since I have a couple of hundreds 
pages, and then, I would like to be able to do it on other similar 
occasions.

Is there a lisp program for such conversion that could be run in batch mode?
If I engage I would certainly employ at least a week to learn such 
lisping if I would be able to make it at all.
Does anyone have any suggestion?
At least which functions to begin considering for this task?

I did find e.g.:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2003-11/msg00436.html
(
#!/use/bin/emacs --script
;; And after that you can use regular elisp code:
(princ "Hello world!")
;; end.
)
and I already experimented in the line on:
emacs -batch file -f function -l lisp-code-from-file
but I remained disoriented as to how these kind of things need are 
really done.
But if someone supplied a few hints I'll delve with some more hope into 
all those volumes of Emacs lore...

So thank you, knowledgeable and kind reader if you care to help!
Miroslav Rovis
www.exDeo.com