Encoding question

[Fernando Apesteguía]

Hi,

I'm trying to compile a C++ software on FreeBSD. While compiling, this
error shows up:

error: stray '\357' in program
error: stray '\273' in program
error: stray '\277' in program

This file is reported (by file[1]) to be "UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) C
program text, with CRLF line terminators" while the rest of the files
in the package are "ASCII C program text, with CRLF line terminators".
While I can convert the file with iconv -c -f utf-8 -t ascii file >
new_file in the post extract stage, I wonder if there is a more
suitable  way for achieving the same thing. Also I would like to avoid
this software from depending on iconv.

Thanks in advance.