Also useful: "man iso-8859-1" (aka latin-1, the most common Western charset if not using UTF-8). For the Windows version, you'll have to visit http://en.wikiped

Also useful: "man iso-8859-1" (aka latin-1, the most common Western charset if not using UTF-8). For the Windows version, you'll have to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 -- non-UTF encoded files are more likely to be that instead of latin-1 (fortunately either is just a s.decode('cp1252') away from Unicode in e.g. Python) There's a surprising amount of data files still being moved around in either of those. If your shell is in UTF-8 mode, you'll learn to recognize either encoding (a single funny character) or the UTF-1252 "encoding" (2 or more chars, where à is often one) where both utf-8 and cp-1252 were used.