Sample code for 30+ languages & platforms
AutoIt

Convert a Text File from utf-8 to Windows-1252

Convert a text file from one character encoding to another.

Chilkat AutoIt Downloads

AutoIt
Local $bSuccess = False

;  It's really simple:  Just load from one charset, save using another.

$oSb = ObjCreate("Chilkat.StringBuilder")

;  In this case, my test file has some norwegian chars in the utf-8 encoding
$bSuccess = $oSb.LoadFile("qa_data/txt/norwegian_chars.txt","utf-8")

;  We could just as well write over the file we just read in.
;  (But I don't want to do that for my example..)
$bSuccess = $oSb.WriteFile("qa_output/norwegian_chars.txt","windows-1252",False)

;  Note:  Windows-1252 is a 1-byte per char encoding, which means it's only capable of representing
;  those chars in Western European languages.   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
;  
;  utf-8 is an encoding that can handle chars in any language, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, etc.
;  If a text file contains chars in these other languages, obviously it cannot be converted to windows-1252 because
;  there are only 256 chars that can possibly be represented in a 1-byte per char encoding.