Your method must read byte by byte and fully understand and appreciate the byte wise construction of characters. The simplest method is to use an editor which will read anything but only output UTF-8 characters. Textpad is one choice.
None of the methods here or on any other similar questions worked for me.
In the end what worked was simply opening the file in Sublime Text 2. Go to File > Reopen with Encoding > UTF-8. Copy the entire content of the file into a new file and save it.
May not be the expected solution but putting this out here in case it helps anyone, since I've been struggling for hours with this.