title: Cannot convert � to readable string with iconv
body: <p>I have a large text file with a <code>iso-8859-1</code> encoding which I obtain from:</p>
  
  <pre><code>file -i file.txt
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I cat a file to see the data, there will be a �� instead of a Thai string. At first, I think that I can just use <code>iconv</code> in linux to convert the encoding format to other type which I found iso-8859-11 format that can read Thai string and think that it will work. Something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t iso-8859-11 file.txt &gt; output.txt
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But instead, I got this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>iconv: illegal input sequence at position 1169
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which is the location that has ��. I tried with <code>//TRANSLIT</code> but still got an unreadable character.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any way that I can convert this text file to read Thai string? I know that I can just open a file with some text editor and save as a encoding format that I want but I have too many files and each file is nearly a gigabyte size. I think that iconv can helpe me convert every file without manually convert each one.</p>
  
  <p>Ps. I have try open with Python:</p>
  
  <pre><code>with open('file.txt','r+', encoding='iso-8859-11') as f:
     print(f.read())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which can read Thai character perfectly but I need to convert a large and many files here so iconv is needed.</p>