Hi proxy,

I think that you are getting confused.

The utility you've mentioned was designed to decode various date/time values found embedded within binary and other file types.
That is the why your output is formatted as a date/time result with time-zone abbreviation.

The way to convert UTF-8 to ASCII is straight forward as UTF-8 was designed for backward compatibility.
For that reason UTF-8 only uses one-byte codes for ASCII values 0 through 127 which allows you to display the same character as the ASCII equivalent (and vice versa) when using this range.

For example:

UTF-8 Encoded Byte 0x41 = The capital letter 'A'
=
Unicode code point U+0041 = The capital letter 'A'
=
ASCII 0x41 = The capital letter 'A'


Any UTF-8 code point larger than 127 are represented by multi-byte sequences and will be lost when you attempt to convert it to ASCII as there is no equivalent character to display. These characters are usually replaced with a question mark.


Best regards,

Doron Moraz