You might want to look at Encoding-FixLatin - I created it for a very similar situation. In my case I had a Postgres database from an application that had treated text as 8-bit binary strings. Each record was one of: ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 or CP1252, but the DB dump as a whole was a mixture of all these. The documentation for Encoding::FixLatin describes the heuristics it uses.

In reply to Re: What's the best way to detect character encodings, Windows-1252 v. UTF-8? by grantm
in thread What's the best way to detect character encodings, Windows-1252 v. UTF-8? by Jim

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