The GEDCOM file I have to parse comes back as a .GED file but in reality, it is merely a UTF-8 text file in which the data fields are not predictable in size but they ARE predictable in their order based on appearance of a specific type of marker. There are some marker fields but then the raw data field is so variable in format that I couldn't run it through something like WORD to convert it to a table based on spaces as delimiters. Therefore, I can't easily convert via columnar positioning. Doesn't matter because if I parse out the elements I can always identify them by the order in which they appeared. THAT is predictable.
To get the ball rolling, I have to download the GEDCOM file and manually edit it using Notepad, which has the ability to convert UTF-8 files to ANSI files. I do not need to do any kind of FIND/REPLACE operations, just the file format conversion. Open, SaveAs, Close. Short and sweet - but I don't recall there being a way to do that via Notepad from VBA because I don't recall there being a .DLL for it.
Once the .GED has been converted to ANSI format as a .TXT file, the presence of <CR><LF> at the end of the line doesn't matter because my parser would handle control characters correctly if they appeared. The only thing it wouldn't have handled would be one of the extended characters of the UTF-8 character set. The ordinary characters, even in UTF-8, were no problem for it but unfortunately, once or twice one of the GEDCOM records contained one of those oddball cases. Fortunately, those cases only occur in something I don't need for my tree structuring. I don't use that particular record type for anything - so when I know that record keyword is present, I just discard the whole thing and skip to the next record.
That same parser once helped me out at work. We had to scan certain web server logs, I believe it was for IIS, because we needed to identify the source of some incoming traffic. Again, IIS and other server logs tend to have fixed order but variable element size, so my parser worked quite well to isolate certain elements of the log file to give us IP addresses and usage patterns. (Yes, I know there are products that do that, but this was years ago and the Navy hadn't bought the statistics analyzer - so I had to "roll my own.")