You're definitely making a mistake somewhere, because I just tested it for myself and it worked perfectly fine. I made a latin-1 file, applied the above code wi

You're definitely making a mistake somewhere, because I just tested it for myself and it worked perfectly fine. I made a latin-1 file, applied the above code with it, and got a correct utf-8 file out. Are you reading the final file back as latin-1? You have to read it as utf-8 of course.