iconv and UTF-8 encoding

[Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu>]

i'm trying to read a file that i'm told is encoded in UTF-8.  the
output of "file" on it says "Non-ISO extended-ASCII English text"
(it's not actually english, but that doesn't matter).  I can't read it
as is, so i'm trying to convert it to ISO-8859-1 or whatever the
standard is that i'm used to with iconv.

following the manpage, i get this:

iconv -f UTF-8 -f ISO_8859-1 stream.lower.ir > new_file.txt

but this still appears with unreadable characters.

does this mean that the file i'm trying to read from isn't actually
UTF-8?  how do i find out what it is, if it's not?

thanks,

</nori>

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