<b_jonas> slashlearn block device/Block devices are a concession made in Unix to make raw hard disks and magnetic tape have a similar interface to regular files and terminals. Since magnetic tapes can\'t write individual bytes, only entire blocks, the interface isn\'t exactly the same, thus the dreaded dd obs= option was born.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import chardet
x = sys.stdin.read()
enc = chardet.detect(x)['encoding']
sys.stdout.write(x.decode(enc).encode('UTF-8'))