About the UTF-8 to ASCII Converter
Systems that still insist on seven bit ASCII are everywhere: filename rules, old payment gateways, SMS gateways, printer queues and CSV imports that mangle anything above 127. This converter folds text down to that range in the least destructive way it can. Accented letters lose their marks so that a Spanish or French name stays recognisable rather than turning into a row of boxes.
Typographic characters get sensible spellings instead. Curly quotes become straight ones, the long dash at U+2014 becomes two hyphens, an ellipsis becomes three full stops, a bullet becomes an asterisk, and the guillemets used in French become angle brackets. Common symbols are spelled out where a single letter would be wrong: the euro sign becomes EUR, the copyright sign becomes (c), the degree sign becomes the word deg, and the multiplication sign becomes a lower case x. Ligatures are expanded, so the ae and oe pairs and the German sharp s each become two letters.
Anything with no reasonable ASCII spelling, an emoji or a Han character for instance, is handled by the fallback setting: a question mark by default, dropped entirely, or written as a Unicode escape when the original value must be recoverable. The other three methods skip transliteration and simply escape, entity encode or delete every non-ASCII character. If accents are the only problem, Remove Accents is more focused, and Unicode Escape covers escaping in more detail.
How to use
- Paste the text that has to become ASCII.
- Pick a method, usually Replace with ASCII look-alikes.
- Choose what should happen to characters with no equivalent, such as emoji.
- Check the status line for how many characters were folded, then copy the result.
Common questions
- Will names stay readable?
- Yes for Latin scripts. Accents are stripped from the base letter, so Muller and Garcia remain recognisable.
- What happens to emoji?
- They have no ASCII spelling, so the fallback setting applies: a question mark, nothing at all, or a \uXXXX escape.
- Is the conversion reversible?
- Only in escape mode. Transliteration and deletion both lose information on purpose.
- Does it change the encoding of my file?
- It changes the characters, which is what makes the text safe to store as ASCII. The tool works on text, not on files.