>
> There surely should be some better way, such as finding which specific
> tuples are problematic, and updating them on the source database.
>
> A thought...  You might do two dumps:
>
> 1.  Raw, no conversion using iconv
>
> 2.  Another, which converts using iconv [generate this by passing file #1
thru iconv...]
>

I am just struggling with this issue, my solution:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION utf8_encode(text)
  RETURNS text AS
$BODY$
($s)=@_;
 utf8::encode($s);
return $s;
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE 'plperlu' IMMUTABLE;



and now :

foreach suspect table {
    update table set field=utf8_encode(field) where field<>
utf8_encode(field)
}

kinda slow, but might be good enough.

Greetings
Marcin