UTF-8 problem (XLS)

[John Coppens <john jcoppens com>]

Hello people.

Using version 1.6.3 of gnumeric, I tried to read an xls file and save it
as csv. There was a problem with the resulting csv file, in that iconv
didn't want to convert it into another coding. I'm not sure where the
problem lies.

The original .xls had the following string in it:

0068 0069 0070 [201A] 0072 ...

I've marked the 201A code, apparently a valid utf-16 code (according to
the xls specs).

Gnumeric (or ssconvert) saved this in the csv as:

68 69 70 E2 80 9A 72 ...

Again 201A, and it seems to be  the shortest utf-8 code that can represent
it. But iconv -f utf8 -t iso-8859-1 chokes on the sequence and aborts
with:

illegal input sequence at position xxxx

I know -c can make iconv skip the error, but that doesn't seem elegant.
Can anyone indicate where to look for a solution?

John