README

CharManiac

Windows console application for file text encoding conversion

History

I thought it would be a simple task to change the encoding of a text file via a batch file in the Windows console and at the same time remove or add the BOM. But I found that even after extensive searching, I couldn't find a reasonable solution.

So I fired up my trusty Delphi and wrote a little console application myself that does exactly what I want.

I'm sure it will be a useful tool for someone else too and so I'm releasing it here as an open source project.

Installation

Download the binary from the releases section and extract it to any folder. The application has no dependencies so you can run it out of the box (that is the beauty of Delphi :-)).

Usage dump

If you call the CharManiac.exe from the console you get the following instructions:

CharManiac SourceEncoding TargetEncoding SourceFile TargetFile
Possible text encodings:
 ASCII
 ANSI
 UTF-8(-BOM)
 Unicode(-BOM)

Optional newline config, append to TargetEncoding:
 -UnixNewLine
 -WindowsNewLine

Examples for valid encodings:
 UTF-8-UnixNewLine
 Unicode-BOM-WindowsNewLine

Warning: TargetFile will be overwritten.

Examples

Add BOM to a UTF-8 file:

CharManiac.exe UTF-8 UTF-8-BOM SourceFileWithoutBOM.txt TargetFileWithBOM.txt

Remove BOM from a UTF-8 file:

CharManiac.exe UTF-8-BOM UTF-8 SourceFileWithBOM.txt TargetFileWithoutBOM.txt

Convert ANSI to UTF-8 with BOM:

CharManiac.exe ANSI UTF-8-BOM SourceAnsi.txt TargetUTF-8-BOM.txt

Convert Unicode (UTF-16) to UTF-8 with BOM:

CharManiac.exe Unicode UTF-8-BOM SourceUTF-16.txt TargetUTF-8-BOM.txt