[Loadstone] Interesting database tool

[Grzegorz Zlotowicz]

Hi,
returning to a dbshell program, i got an answer from the author few days 
ago, he says, that an automatic import feature will be implemented no 
earlier than in a year because of some complications...
So one way to make use of dbshell is still injecting data to a console 
input.
I found a winapi function that does this, and wrote a program that runs a 
dbshell as an child process, and on an other thread injects sql queries to 
the console input buffer, and everything seems to work well - importing 300 
thousands of pois takes no more than half an hour, there isn't any data loss 
in the process...
Only one trouble is a need to convert input file from utf-8 to ascii (not 
even ansi, but just ASCII, lower 7 bit of Ansi), and my question is, do you 
know any free program, possibly working automatically taking parameters from 
command line, and making a conversion of utf8 file to ascii...
I know such tool for Polish language, but have no idea about an other 
non-english languages...
The main trick is of course to replace some national characters into its' 
ascii most near equivalents, for example a instead of Polish "a", but 
working also on a Germany umlauts and things like this.
There isn't any way to force dbshell to work with utf8, even changing a 
console codepage to utf-8 has no effect, so only method seems to be 
conversion of a database into ASCII...
I hope that in few days i will be able to finish work on a first 
experimental version and a few words of documentation, which i'll share on 
this list of course...
Greetings, Greg.