RE: converting ISO 8859-1 character set text to ASCII (128)charactet set

[Murray Sargent]

If you need to roundtrip 8859-1 through ASCII, you need to use some kind
of escape mechanism inside the ASCII to represent characters that have
their high bit equal to one. A common simple escape is to use the
backslash. So you could represent the codes as \'xx, where xx is the
hexadecimal code. For this to work, you need to represent backslash
itself in some distinctive way like \'5C or maybe \\. Similarly you
could use \a to represent 'a' with the high bit set, that is �. Etc.

Murray