ISO-8859 to UTF8 conversion

I thought I was through with this long time ago, but just today it bit me again: a text file with German umlauts was not displaying correctly in less. It turned out to be ISO-8859 encoded ... To make sure I'll remember, here is what I did:

iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 file.txt >file_utf8.txt

Again, this has been described a lot of times elsewhere.