I hesitate to blog this because this tool is really really really really rough, quick, and dirty.  As in it needs a big ol’ box of Tide.  

I needed to convert a bunch of UTF-16 text files into UTF-8 so I spent five minutes writing a little console app to do it.

This thing literally has no exception handling etc, but it gets the job done for my needs and I thought others might find it useful if they have exactly the same need. 

Hey, feel free to clean up the code and send it back to me, or point me in the direction of some free tool I should’ve used all along.

USAGE: batchencode extension encoding [backup]
    extension: file extension with the dot. ex .sql, .txt
    encoding:  values... utf7, utf8, unicode, bigendianunicode, ascii
    backup:    optional fully qualified (sorry) backup directory.

Download the code here.