I think it's a double-encoding error. Text was encoded into utf-8, whose bytes got misinterpreted as codepoints, and encoded again. ü in utf-8 is (c3 bc), and U

I think it's a double-encoding error. Text was encoded into utf-8, whose bytes got misinterpreted as codepoints, and encoded again. ü in utf-8 is (c3 bc), and U+00c3, U+00bc are Ã, ¼ respectively. $ echo 'Zürich' | iconv -f latin1 -t utf-8 Zürich