How to remove non UTF-8 characters from text file

Question

I have a bunch of Arabic, English, Russian files which are encoded in utf-8. Trying to process these files using a Perl script, I get this error:

Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal)

Manually checking the content of these files, I found some strange characters in them. Now I'm looking for a way to automatically remove these characters from the files.

Is there anyway to do it?

Solution

This command:

iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -c file.txt

will clean up your UTF-8 file, skipping all the invalid characters.

-f is the source format
-t the target format
-c skips any invalid sequence