# convert iso-8859-1 to unicode to utf-8, where `v` is the string in `iso-8859-1` format
v.decode("iso-8859-1").encode("utf-8")
And as a note, this is also some basic rule:
If you have no way of finding out the correct encoding of the file, then try the following encodings, in this order:
utf-8
iso-8859-1 (also known as latin-1)