Fixing mojibakes in UTF-8 text

Question

I have a file with text in Portuguese in UTF-8. Somehow, who produced the file selected the wrong encoding, and the text is full of mojibake:

IDENTIFICAÌàÌÄO ins         


        

Answer 1

"André" instead of "André" is the Latin-1 interpretation of UTF-8 encoding. You can fix it by inverting the encoding/decoding:

>>> 'André'.encode('latin-1').decode('utf-8')
'André'

All cases following this pattern can be fixed like that.

However, I can't explain the other case (with "Ìà" for "ç" and "ÌÄ" for "ã"), and therefore can't provide a solution. If you can find a codec where "Ì", "à", and "Ä" have the codepoints C3, A7, and A3, respectively, then you can use this instead of Latin-1 for fixing the text.