Converting special charactes such as ü and à back to their original, latin alphbet counterparts in C#

Question

I have been given an export from a MySQL database that seems to have had it\'s encoding muddled somewhat over time and contains a mix of HTML char codes such as

Answer 1

It's probably windows-1252 encoded string which you read as UTF-8.

As Guffa mentioned data has been corrupted.

Lets take a look on bytes:
ö -> C3B6 in UTF8

in windows-1252 C3 ->Ã B6 ->¶

so ö ->ö

what about all these "ƒÂ":

ƒ ->83 Â ->C2

Honesty i don't know why they appear, but you can try erase them and do some conversions as Guffa mentioned. Good luck