how to convert text file with unknown 16 bit encoding to 8 bi t as cii

[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Pete" == Lancashire, Pete <plancashire at ci.portland.or.us> writes:

    Pete>  ok 7 BIT :-), in my frustration should have said single
    Pete> byte ...  well I did it with a perl hack i.e. skip the first
    Pete> 2 bytes and send to stdout every other byte...

So you are assuming UTF-16BE (or LE if it's the odd numbered bytes you
are sending), and that every odd (or even) byte is zero.

In that case you could just use iconv with the (assumed) encoding
specified (UTF-16 - iconv will read the BOM and get the endianess
right) , and you should get a decent error message if your
assumption is wrong.
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire