My approach to guessing the encoding would be to look for well-known phrases/trigrams. For example, if you know the language of the text, look for trigrams (or longer sequences) that indicate the encoding.

"über" would be a good German word which commonly (enough) appears in the text and if you get

     "\xFCber" # ANSI / Latin-1
        "\xC3\xBCber" # UTF-8

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In reply to Re^9: convert files to ansi (8859-1) by Corion
in thread convert files to ansi (8859-1) by Yaerox

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