gedit does not open files with a few invalid characters

I'm trying to open a log file which has a few invalid characters and I get a "Could not open the file .... gedit has not been able to detect the character coding. Please check that you are not trying to open a binary file. Select a character coding from the menu and try again.". What I'm trying it to "cat -v" the file then open it with gedit, however as some of the log files are quite large this is an unnecessary step. Is there some way I can force it to open with an encoding then just display a ? or a box?