native2ascii.exe is included with the JDK in J:\Program Files\java\jdk1.6.0_06\bin. It converts files from any encoding to 8-bit printable form, and back. 8-bit printable using ASCII characters plus forms like \u95e8 for the exotic characters.

Here is how you would take a file in the old DOS IBMOEM encoding and bring it up to UTF-8 snuff for posting on the web.

REM convert IBM OEM fil to ASCII with \escapes
native2ascii -encoding Cp437 ibm.txt intermediate.txt

REM convert intermediate ASCII with \escapes to windows-1252
native2ascii -encoding windows-1252 -reverse intermediate.txt web.txt

REM convert UTF-8 to ascii with \escapes
native2ascii -encoding UTF-8 utf.txt intermediate.txt

REM convert intermediate ASCII with \escapes to CP1252
native2ascii -encoding Cp1252 -reverse intermediate.txt nt.txt

REM export part of the registry
regedit /E java.reg "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft"

REM convert unicode to readable ASCII with escapes.
native2ascii -encoding UnicodeLittle java.reg java.asc

You can also use native2ascii to compose arbitrary binary files. Compose using \uxxxx sequences and then convert them to binary.native2ascii -encoding UnicodeBigUnmarked will give you a straightforward transform to binary. Other encodings will let you create a variaty of exotic files.

If you have BOMs use x-UTF-16LE-BOM, X-UTF-32BE-BOM and X-UTF-32LE-BOM which have a definite BOM. The encodings where it is optional seem to flummox native2ascii.

See this list of possible encodings.

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