Comment 1 for bug 7427

I don't seem to be able to persuade recode to do this, even with -f:

  $ echo 'Frédéric' | recode UTF-8..ASCII
  Frrecode: Invalid input in step `UTF-8..ANSI_X3.4-1968'
  $ echo 'Frédéric' | recode -f UTF-8..ASCII
  Fric

The best that's available when base-config is invoked is probably iconv. That
performs slightly less badly, but still not well enough:

  $ echo 'Frédéric' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII
  Friconv: illegal input sequence at position 2
  $ echo 'Frédéric' | iconv -c -f UTF-8 -t ASCII
  Frdric

The Perl Text::Iconv module's convert() method just returns undef.

If you know how to persuade any of these tools to do the right thing, I'd be
interested to hear it.