The native2ascii is an useful JDK build-in tool which you can use to convert a file with any kind of special characters or "non-Unicode" characters to "Unicode-encoded" characters. Following is how you can do that. ================= 1) Create a file named "mySpecialCharacters.txt" and any characters inside it. Save it as "UTF-8" format. 2) Use native2ascii command to convert it into Unicode format. Following is the command assuming that the input file is in your E drive. E:\>native2ascii -encoding utf8 E:\mySpecialCharacters.txt E:\outputUniCharacters.txt The native2ascii will read all the characters from "E:\mySpecialCharacters.txt" and encode it with "utf8" format, and output all encoded characters to "E:\outputUniCharacters.txt" 3) Now if you open up "E:\outputUniCharacters.txt" you will see all the encoded characters.