import-csv with accented characters

I was trying to import some users into AD. The users are international and hence have some special characters in their names (such as French accents: é, ê, è). For some reason import-csv does not handle this properly and screws up the characters. Searching around, I found a post "Vista - import-csv missing charakters".

It turns out that I had to convert my original file to ASCII which can be done simply by:
cat file.csv > asciifile.csv

Then import-csv worked.

By the way, import-csv does not take pipeline input the way one would expect so you can't to something like get-content file.csv | csv-import