To convert a string to utf-8 you need to do two operations:
- decode the string to unicode (using the original file codec)
- encode the unicode string using utf-8 codec
This is what decoder.decoder function is doing but it is guessing the
original codec.
You need to either provide the right codec for decoding (if you know it is
always the
same) or guess it better (e.g. by catching exception and trying different
codecs in order).
input_codec = "iso-8592-1"
output = text.decode(input_codec).encode("utf-8")
