from sys import argv
import codecs

name, codec=argv

#f = codecs.open("example.html", 'r', 'cp1140')
f = codecs.open("example.html", 'r', codec)
u = f.read()   # now the contents have been transformed to a Unicode string
out = codecs.open("example_u.html", 'w', 'utf-8')
out.write(u)   # and now the contents have been output as UTF-8