You won’t like the answer, but Emacs has support for code pages.

@Ringding:

Thank you for answering my message. I am afraid however that you are correct. I don't really like the idea of having to use Emacs.

However an idea occurred to me:

I could try developing a utility that decodes special characters to escape sequences which can be converted back to characters again. I wrote such functions several times before: https://github.com/PeterSwinkels/Cartooners-F … 0Viewer/Core.vb (Escape() and Unescape()), for example. Come to think of it, such a program would also have to handle line breaks correctly.

Or are there programs which can do that already?

While they're still in the early stages of development these two utilities I wrote look promising for my purposes. As they currently work you use "Escape.bas" to convert any character outside the 32-127 range (except for line breaks (13)) to a hexadecimal escape sequence. The resulting text written to stdio (displayed on screen.) This means you need to redirect the program's output to a file if you want to save it. "Unescape" works the same way but does the opposite.

With a little more work I think these programs will be useful for dealing with small files containing a few special characters. Binary data or large files would probably be too impractical and slow.

Of course feedback, suggestions, or questions are always welcome!

I use jEdit, it has heaps of encodings available.

This one? http://www.jedit.org/ - It looks promising. Thanks for the tip BloodyCactus!

EDIT:
Unfortunately jEdit requires something called "jdk 11". The page the jEdit installer sends me doesn't appear to have an installer available. For now, I am going to stick to my idea of just using escape sequences.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2022-04-23, 10:33:

I have noticed that Notepad (Windows) usually isn't able to properly decode and display extended characters and encodes special characters in a way that isn't supported by DOS based programs when saving.

What about Notepad++? It has a pretty extensive "Encoding" menu with "Character sets" submenus, but I have not investigated its ability to deal with all sorts of code pages, nor its DOS compatibility.

JDK11 is just the Java JDK. Go to https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/11/ to get it.

@dr_st:
Notepad++ installed without problems and I am going to give it a try. Thank you!

@_rob:
Thanks for the tip, unfortunately I have already been on that page it appears to be nothing but some generic information. Do you have a direct link to the page containing the jdk installer?

https://jdk.java.net/archive/ has the old versions. Note that Java 17 is considered the current LTS (Long-Term-Support) release, and unless jedit really needs JDK11, I would use JDK17 instead.

@_rob:
Thank you, but I found that page too the last time I was trying to install jdk. Those archives just contain a bunch of files but no installer. I have no idea what I would need to do with those to get jEdit to work.

That is because Oracle is being Oracle, and made things very convoluted in attempts to cash in on Java. They want you to use the Oracle branded version.
e.g., https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java … -downloads.html

See here for an alternative to Oracle:
https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases

For Linux it's easy, your distro will supply you with the openjdk version in it's package manager.

@_rob:
Thank you, perhaps I will look at your links later. I am looking into my own personal solution for now. Also, at this moment I prefer to stick with Windows because switching to Linux might make it easier to install jEdit, but will bring a whole set of another issues with it instead.

I have decided to try to write my own custom solution to the problem described in my earlier posts instead of using an editor such as Notepad++ or jEdit.

Short description of the problem at hand:
1. The text files for a DOS based program need to be translated into a language which uses a few special characters that cannot easily be entered using a USA English keyboard.
2. Notepad cannot decode or encode extended characters (128-255) in a manner suitable for text files used by DOS programs.
3. Some text has to be entered using a Windows program as using a DOS based editor only is too impractical when copy/pasting from a web browser.

The solution:
1. A program that reads a text file that may or may not contain extended characters and outputs another text file in which any such characters are encoded in a way convenient for editing and that can easily be read by a Windows or DOS program.
2. This program can convert text files with "encoded" extended characters back to a text file containing such characters in a manner a DOS program can handle.

Note:
The program as provided contains a few other features specific to what I intend to use it for and has not been fully tested yet.

The specific features are:
1. The extension of the original unencoded file is placed at the top of the encoded output file.
2. This extension is used to determine the output file's name when decoding.
3. Of the control characters (0-31) only the Tab and Line Break characters are encoded. (9 and 13). Other control characters are skipped as being "unsupported."

To everyone who has responded: Thank you. Your suggestions are appreciated!