How can I change a huge text file from ANSI to UTF-8?

Question

I have a text file whose size is 1.3 GB. Most of text editors (including NotePad++) cannot open it. I need to change its format from ANSI to UTF-8. In what program can I do this?

Answer 1

Try EmEditor. It supports Huge files very well. Free version exists.

Answer 2

If you want a free (and open source) command-line tool that can run on Windows, and which allows you to convert huge files from ANSI to UTF-8 (or any other encodings), you can use this tool that I've just created (runs on nodejs and uses the iconv-lite library):

https://github.com/sorin-postelnicu/convert-file-encoding

You can use it like this:

node bin\convertFileEncoding.js -f latin-1 -t utf-8 -i myinputfile.txt -o myoutputfile.txt

It is fast and supports converting very large files with minimal memory consumption (around 20MB of RAM no matter the size of the input file).