There's enca library (and cli tool) which does that. I used it often before UTF-8 became overwhelming. The situation was especially dire with Russian encodings.

There's enca library (and cli tool) which does that. I used it often before UTF-8 became overwhelming. The situation was especially dire with Russian encodings. There were three 1-byte encodings which were quite wide-spread: KOI8-R mostly found in unixes, CP866 used in DOS and CP1251 used in Windows. What's worse, with Windows you sometimes had to deal with both CP866 and CP1251 because it includes DOS subsystem with separate codepage.