in reply to accented characters are garbled
I'd wager your first problem is getting your terminal encoding correct. Since the file is UTF-8, and you can't "view" it with curl, your terminal encoding most probably isn't UTF-8. Which terminal are you using? A Linux one or something like PuTTY? Poke around the options a bit.
(ā is a tricky character: it can't be found in the usual legacy latin encodings. That means you can't translate it to a latin encoding -- your best bet is to get UTF-8 working correctly and forget about playing with other character encodings.)
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