"Anyone know of a free tool that is good for reading/converting/writing file encodings?"
Does tclsh count? 😊
Something along the lines of:
set input [open $input_file]
set output [open $output_file]
fconfigure $input -encoding $input_encoding
fconfigure $output -encoding $output_encoding
puts $output [read $input]
close $output
close $input
I've never worked with encodings, but it seems like Tcl would make a great language to write a simple command line utility in to do this...