We’ve got some pretty large CSS files to work with on a few projects I work on, and use SCSS plus the Compass tool to make management of the styles a bit easier. Recently, though, Compass has been throwing us this error:

    error scss/sportsnet.scss (Line 969 of scss/_inc-controls.scss: Invalid UTF-8 character "\xCA")

The root cause appears to be non-ASCII characters in a SCSS file. That’s easy enough to root out by hand if the file is a manageable size, but if you need an automated filter instead, try the following:

iconv -t ASCII//IGNORE -f UTF8 < _inc-controls.scss > _inc-controls.ascii

This pipes the offending SCSS file through iconv, and spits out the file _inc-controls.ascii which should contain differing lines where non-ASCII lines are found.