tba $ python --version
Python 2.7.8

 tba $ xxd ./questionably_encoded.txt
00000000: 2e2e 2e20 302d 310a 0a5b 4576 656e 7420  ... 0-1..[Event
00000010: 2248 6172 7661 7264 2043 7570 2033 30b4  "Harvard Cup 30.
00000020: 225d 0a2e 2e2e                           "]....

 tba $ cat ~/bin/check-encoding
#!/usr/bin/env python

import argparse, codecs

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--encoding', '-e', default=None)
parser.add_argument('file')
args = parser.parse_args()

f = codecs.open(args.file, 'r', encoding=args.encoding)
line_number = 1
try:
	for line in f:
		line_number += 1
	print('%s\tvalid %s' % (args.file, args.encoding))
except Exception as e:
	print('error on line %s' % line_number)
	raise e

 tba $ check-encoding ./questionably_encoded.txt
./questionably_encoded.txt	valid None

 tba $ python -c 'import locale; print locale.getpreferredencoding()'
UTF-8

 tba $ check-encoding -e UTF-8 ./questionably_encoded.txt
error on line 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/tba/bin/check-encoding", line 18, in <module>
    raise e
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 0: invalid start byte

 tba $ python -c 'import sys; print sys.getdefaultencoding()'
ascii

 tba $ check-encoding -e ascii ./questionably_encoded.txt
error on line 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/tba/bin/check-encoding", line 18, in <module>
    raise e
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

 tba $ python -c 'import locale; print locale.getpreferredencoding(False)'
US-ASCII

 tba $ check-encoding -e US-ASCII ./questionably_encoded.txt
error on line 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/tba/bin/check-encoding", line 18, in <module>
    raise e
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

 tba $