As mentioned above, the iconv program will do this. If you're on Linux or some other system with the GNU tools, you're all set. If you're on windows, fret not - It's been ported: Link! You do need to know the original encoding of the file, however. If it is a Western-European type file, chances are that it's encoded in iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15, which adds the € and a couple of extra accented characters (or in Windows-1252, which is almost the same, but not quite, see Wikipedia for more info). If it's Russian or Vietnamese or Ancient Greek, well the encoding is going to be different, and you'll have to look up the right one.