diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 0a3aea8..d8f0fbf 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -55,6 +55,32 @@ flawfinder (including its various options) and related information
 (such as how it supports CWE).  For example, the `--html` option generates
 output in HTML format. The `--help` option gives a brief list of options.
 
+# Character Encoding Errors
+
+Flawfinder must be able to correctly interpret your source code's
+character encoding.
+In the vast majority of cases this is not a problem, especially
+if the source code is correctly encoded using UTF-8 and your system
+is configured to use UTF-8 (the most common situation by far).
+
+However, it's possible for flawfinder to halt if there is a
+character encoding problem and you're running Python3.
+The usual symptom is error meesages like this:
+`Error: encoding error in FILENAME 'ENCODING' codec can't decode byte ... in position ...: invalid start byte`
+
+Unfortunately, Python3 fails to provide useful built-ins to deal with this.
+Thus, it's non-trivial to deal with this problem without depending on external
+libraries (which we're trying to avoid).
+
+If you have this problem, see the flawfinder manual page for a collection
+of various solutions.
+One of the simplest is to simply convert the source code and system
+configuration to UTF-8.
+You can convert source code to UTF-8 using tools such as the
+system tool `iconv` or the Python program
+[`cvt2utf`](https://pypi.org/project/cvt2utf/);
+you can install `cvt2utf` using `pip install cvt2utf`.
+
 # Under the hood
 
 More technically, flawfinder uses lexical scanning to find tokens
diff --git a/flawfinder.1 b/flawfinder.1
index 992e789..07acc1e 100644
--- a/flawfinder.1
+++ b/flawfinder.1
@@ -664,7 +664,10 @@ You may be able to replace "C" after LC_ALL= with your real language locale
 
 Option #4: Convert the encoding of the files to be analyzed so that it's
 a single encoding - it's highly recommended to convert to UTF-8.
-For example, the program "iconv" can be used to convert encodings.
+For example, the system program "iconv"
+or the Python program cvt2utf
+can be used to convert encodings.
+(You can install cvt2utf with "pip install cvtutf").
 This works well if some files have one encoding, and some have another,
 but they are consistent within a single file.
 If the files have encoding errors, you'll have to fix them.