Added utilities and FAQ.

doc/source/faq.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Frequently Asked Questions
+==========================

doc/source/index.rst

@@ -12,8 +12,12 @@ Welcome to MontePy's documentation!
 
    starting
 
+   utilities
+
    tricks
 
+   faq
+
    developing
 
    api/modules

doc/source/utilities.rst

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+Utility Scripts
+===============
+
+Package Level Execution Options
+-------------------------------
+.. code-block:: console
+
+        usage: montepy [-h] [-c [input_file ...]]
+
+        Tool for editing and working with MCNP input files.
+
+        options:
+          -h, --help            show this help message and exit
+          -c [input_file ...], --check [input_file ...]
+                                Check the given input file(s) for errors. Accepts globs, and multiple arguments.
+
+Checking Input Files for Errors
+-------------------------------
+MontePy can be used to check for errors that it will check for.
+MontePy will check for:
+
+* general syntax errors
+* syntax errors for all MCNP Objects supported (e.g., cells, surfaces, materials, etc.)
+* Bad references to other object when the object referring to another object is supported.
+* Bad mode options
+
+It will print all errors it found in the input to the terminal.
+
+To use this run:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   python -m montepy -c [files]
+
+Converting Encoding to ASCII
+----------------------------
+
+.. _ascii_command:
+
+Command Line Options
+++++++++++++++++++++
+.. code-block:: console
+
+        usage: Change_to_ascii [-h] [-d | -w] in_file out_file
+
+        Change the encoding of a file to strict ASCII. Everything not compliant will be removed.
+
+        positional arguments:
+          in_file           The input file to convert
+          out_file          The input file to convert
+
+        options:
+          -h, --help        show this help message and exit
+          -d, --delete      Delete any non-ascii characters. This is the default.
+          -w, --whitespace  Replace non-ascii characters with a space.
+
+
+Background
+++++++++++
+`Character encoding <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding>`_ is the process of representing all characters as numbers,
+so they may be used by a computer.
+It is the bane of almost all programmers.
+
+The `American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII>`_ is one of the oldest,
+and simplest encoding standards.
+It uses one byte per character, 
+and only goes from 0 – 127.
+This has some issues, being very American-centric,
+and also only allowing 128 characters, 
+52 of them being the English alphabet.
+One solution to this was `"Extended ASCII" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII>`_,
+which used the final bit, and allowed the encoding system
+to include 0 – 255.
+There isn't one "Extended ASCII",
+but one of the most popular encodings is Windows CP-1252.
+This isn't great.
+
+The most commonly used encoding now is `UTF-8 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>`_, or "unicode".
+UTF-8 can support almost any printable character in any language, including emojis.
+The complexity is that each character is a variable-length of bytes.
+This means that older software, like fortran, may get confused by it.
+
+As far as I can tell MCNP does not document what encoding it uses.
+ASCII is the most conservative bet, 
+so MontePy by default tries to read input files in strict ASCII.
+
+Dealing with Encoding Issues
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+
+You are likely here because you got an error message something like this:
+
+>>> montepy.read_input("example.imcnp")
+UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
+<snip>
+UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 1132: ordinal not in range(128)
+
+You can either change the encoding used by :func:`~montepy.input_parser.input_reader.read_input`,
+or just force the entire file to be strictly ASCII.
+
+MontePY offers the ``change_to_ascii`` script. 
+The options are listed above: :ref:`ascii_command`.
+For any non-ASCII character it will either remove
+the character or replace it with a space (``' '``).
+It defaults to deleting.
+To replace it with a space instead use ``-w``. 
+Otherwise the arguments are the input file to correct,
+and the path to write the output file to.
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   change_to_ascii -w unicode_input.imcnp ascii_input.imcnp