Can you translate utf8 file to ascii with non-ascii characters replaced by tex-macro?

Question

The title says it all. I have a unicode (utf-8) file which contains some non-ascii characters, e.g. "ö" and translate it into an ascii-file where the non-ascii characters are replaced with tex-macros, in this case \"o.

Any ideas? I found this converter but it's only to HTML.

Answer 1

you can take a look at utf2any
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/utf2any
not sure if it does what you want

or maybe some other package from one of these lists
http://www.ctan.org/keyword/encodings
http://www.ctan.org/characterization/primary/tools/convert-formats/

generally i would say it is preferrable to use a completly utf8 capable toolchain instead of converting utf8 files to non-utf8

edit: i see you want for utf-8 for you bibliography: there are utf-8 capable tools available for this. instead of bibtex you can use biblatex and biber - switching is easy! i have lots of äöüß and more in my .bib-file and it works just great. as a start you can try something like

\usepackage[
    backend=biber,
    style=authoryear-icomp,
    sortlocale=de_DE,
    natbib=true,
]{biblatex}
\bibliography{Bibfile}

Answer 2

With biblatex and biber, you can set the biblatex options

bibencoding=utf8
texencoding=ascii

And biber will reencode your utf8 bib file into TeX macros in the .bbl

See the biber manual for details and options