Charco is a character set conversion tool. WIth Charco, you can turn a file represented by a local character set into the one represented by another character set. Charco supports the most common character set encodings found on Windows, OS X and Linux, including a full complement of UTF-encodings.

To change character set encodings with Charco for the text in your file, follow the following 4-step procedure.

1. •Select the input file by pressing the Input File button.
   

2. •Select the character encoding for the input file.
   

3. •Select the encoding you want the output file to be in.
   

4. •Press the Save As button to select the name for the output file which will contain the text in its new character encoding. After selecting the file name for the output file, the recoding process will run.
   

New for version 0.8.1 beta

Added logging for the batch mode. When the batch mode finishes or is terminated, a text document will open with the complete log of the actions performed by the batch run. Save this file somewhere if you want to keep this information.

New for version 0.8.0 beta

Charco now has a batch processing mode which you can access from the menu, under Tools. The batch mode takes an input folder and recursively processes it, recoding the text files in the directories into their recoded version. The output is directed to another folder. Files in this folder may be overwritten, so be careful about the folder you choose. Charco prevents recursion into your input- and output  folder to protect from endless recursion, but overwrites files in the output directory with the same name as the input files if they already exist.

In batch mode, Charco only processes text files and files with the extensions .txt, .htm, .html, .csv and .asc. Aliases (linked directories or files) and invisible files are ignored.

Batch processing can be interrupted by pushing the 'Cancel Batch' button.

Charco supports drag and drop, and will fire the encoding upon receiving a file or folder. When a folder is dropped, the batch mode will activate.

Charco remembers you input- and output settings for the session, so that you can easily keep dropping files onto the application. To clear all settings, select Edit - Clear.

In this version, the maximum recursion depth is set at 5, and the maximum number of files the batch mode will process is capped at 1000.

If you like this application, please consider a donation to keep its development going.