[fpc-pascal] Locale question

[Richard Kimber]

I have a text file, containing '£' characters, that file -bi reports as
    text/plain; charset=utf-8
When I try to write a simple pascal program to edit this file using
nothing more than copy, insert, and stringreplace, the output file is
reported as:
    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
and I get '£' instead of '£'.

Is there a way of forcing the output to be UTF8, so that the pound
character appears unchanged?

I'm using fpc ver 3.0.2+dfsg-5ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 17.10, and am not an
expert.
-- 
Richard Kimber