I noticed by chance that the 2 characters § and £ are on 2 bytes ???
I thought there were both ASCII standard then 1 byte. http://math.pc.vh.free.fr/info/ascii.htm
Run the following code :
Var s As String = "£§"
System.DebugLog s + " : " + s.Bytes.ToString // UTF-8
s = s.ConvertEncoding(Encodings.ISOLatin1)
System.DebugLog s + " : " + s.Bytes.ToString // ISO 8859-1