I sometimes pipe stuff through the following one liner for utf8 conversion: 
cat my_file | perl -e 'use Encode "from_to"; while (<>) {my $s = $_; f
+rom_to($s,"iso-8859-1","utf8"); print $s}'

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In reply to Re: What one-liners do people actually use? by Siddartha
in thread What one-liners do people actually use? by TomDLux

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