(I wonder how many different anonymonks have been posting in this thread?)

When the character "lower case o with acute accent" is encoded in iso-8859-1 or cp1252, it is the single byte 0xF3.

The unicode code point for that letter is 0x00F3, and when this is encoded in utf8, it is a 2-byte sequence: 0xC3 0xB3.

(In case you want to understand how 0x00F3 relates to the utf8 two-byte 0xC3 0xB3, look at the perlunicode man page, way down in the section titled "Unicode Encodings".)

When that utf8 2-byte sequence is displayed by any tool that uses iso-8859-1 or cp1252, instead of showing "lower case o with acute accent", you will see the two characters "upper case A with tilde" followed by "superscript 3", because in those single-byte encodings, those are the characters assigned to the code points 0xC3 and 0xB3, respectively. In other words, the two utf8 bytes are being misinterpreted as separate single-byte code points.

To see the text displayed properly, use a display tool that knows how to handle utf8 encoding. If you would rather have your text data stored in a single-byte encoding, you can try something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
use Encode 'from_to';

$_ = get("http://www.example.com");
from_to( $_, 'utf8', 'cp1252' );

open(O,">","test.txt") or die "open failed on test.txt: $!";
print O;
[download]

But be aware that your web page might come with utf8 characters that fall outside the range of your chosen single-byte code page. When that happens, your output file will losing some data, because each character that cannot be converted will be replaced by a question mark character.