title: Converting a Postgresql database from SQL_ASCII, containing mixed encoging types, to UTF-8
body: <p>I have a postgresql database I would like to convert to UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that it is currently SQL_ASCII, so hasn't been doing any kind of encoding conversion on its input, and as such has ended up with data of a mix of encoding types in the tables. One row might contain values encoded as UTF-8, another might be ISO-8859-x, or Windows-125x, etc.</p>
  
  <p>This has made performing a dump of the database, and converting it to UTF-8 with the intention of importing it into a fresh UTF-8 database, difficult. If the data were all of one encoding type, I could just run the dump file through iconv, but I don't think that approach works here.</p>
  
  <p>Is the problem fundamentally down to knowing how each data is encoded? Here, where that is not known, can it be worked out, or even guessed? Ideally I'd love a script which would take a file, any file, and spit out valid UTF-8.</p>