invalid character data during recursive add

I'm working on getting a web site under svn control, but I'm running to an
error during import which I'm not sure how to handle. It seems to me that I'm
not being given enough information to correct the problem, and I'm wondering
if someone can help me get svn to be a bit more specific.

For reference, I'm using svn under RedHat Edge Server 3.0, connecting to a
remote repository over https, also running under Edge Server 3.0. I've
changed my local LANG environment variable to 'C' to avoid conflicts since
the files are primarily ISO-8859-1, while the default charset of the OS is
UTF-8. (If I leave my charset as UTF-8, then I get errors on the same files as
below, just slightly different errors).

I'm at the stage where I'm doing an 'svn add *' in the trunk/ directory of my
working copy -- setting up the initial import. The add is aborting early,
with the following text (I'm including a few non-error lines for context):

A en/forms/form2.html
A en/forms/form3.html
A en/pwd
A en/home-info
A en/q4.2003.docs
A (bin) en/q4.2003.docs/CB Certification - Effective Date Dec 4 2003 - english - Final.doc
A en/q4.2003.docs/CB Certification - Effective Date Dec 4 2003 - english - Final.txt
svn: Error during recursive add of 'en/q4.2003.docs'
svn: Can't recode string

If I run this without switching away from the default UTF-8 character set, I
get this error instead (details vary depending on the file):

svn: Error during recursive add of 'en/q4.2003.docs'
svn: Valid UTF-8 data
(hex: 73 61 74 69 6f 6e 5f 64 65 73 5f 6d 61 72 71 75 65 73 5f 64 5f 61 67 72)
followed by invalid UTF-8 sequence
(hex: e9 6d 65 6e)

If I do another 'svn add *' it will move past this file, and error on a
different file. In total, I've got four or five files that generate the same
error during an add. Some of these files have a rather sordid past, so it's
no surprise to me that they might contain mismatched character sets and the
like, but it would be helpful to me if svn would report more specifically what
string is causing the error, or at least what line number it appears on.

Running a subsequent 'svn add *' command appears to move past this file, but
will die later on a different file (same error). It takes several runs of the
add command to get through the whole directory tree. Because the subsequent
add commands move past files that generated an error on the previous pass,
it's unclear to me whether the files are actually being added or not.

There's something else here that's confusing as well... once everything has
been added, running 'svn status' dies with this error on one of the files that
killed the add on pass two or three, instead of the file that killed the add
on pass one. That might just be a matter of the 'status' command sorting
differently than the shell is though.

So for my question...

Can anyone shed any light on how to get svn to be more specific about the
errors it is encountering so that I can fix the files in question... or
alternatively suggest another way to find the errors in the files and fix them?
They're rather large, so eye-balling the contents isn't really an option.

-- 
Matt Pounsett                 CIRA - Canadian Internet Registration Authority
Technical Support Programmer                    350 Sparks Street, Suite 1110
matt.pounsett@cira.ca                                 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
613.237.5335 ext. 231                                      http://www.cira.ca
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