One (of many) uses I used xxd for: viewing a byte stream that is supposed to be utf-8 text, but the non-ascii characters in the file are not displaying properly

One (of many) uses I used xxd for: viewing a byte stream that is supposed to be utf-8 text, but the non-ascii characters in the file are not displaying properly. Hex viewers will let you see exactly what bytes are present, without interpretation. As for the utf-8 stream, it turned out to have been double encoded into utf-8.