Take a look at piconv. It's an very useful tool. For example, you want to resolve the alias "latin1"

piconv -r latin1
[download]

It'll return the canonical name iso-8859-1. If you want to make sure that it's encoded in latin1

piconv -t iso-8859-1 $file
[download]

It'll print the iso-8859-1 file to STDOUT.