Please note that changing the declaration at the top of the file does not magically the encoding of the file. The encoding attribute serves only as a hint to the interpreter that the file is of a specific encoding.

If you really want to recode your file, use any of the several methods already mentioned, or try the gnu recode utility (under cygwin, since you are on win32).

The character in question is character 163 (A3 hex). Its binary representation in iso-8859-1 and windows-1252 is A3. However the utf-8 encoding of this character is C2A3. So the character string is being stored (possibly correctly) in UTF8. However when you try to print it, your print command thinks it is normal windows1252 text which is why you see the two characters you do.