Converting encoding from unknown-8bit to us-ascii not supported

Question

I am trying to convert from unknown-8bit to us-ascii by using iconv. I have $ iconv -f unknown-8bit -t us-ascii file.txt > file1.txt

It shows an error message.

iconv: conversion from `unknown-8bit' is not supported
Try `iconv --help' or `iconv --usage' for more information.

Is there an alternative to conduct the conversion? Thank you!!

Answer 1

You could use cat -v, e.g.,

cat -v file.txt > file1.txt

On most platforms, that will give an ASCII file.