Converting "unknown-8bit" charset to UTF-8

You can use enca or chardet, enca will probably be more successful.

If you know the language the document was written in, you can guess the encoding and try converting until you get the right results:

• English, French, German, Spanish... – usually Windows-1252

• Russian, Ukrainian... – usually Windows-1251

• Polish, Czech, Hungarian... – usually Windows-1250 or ISO-8859-2

• Japanese – usually Shift-JIS

and so on.