On Dec 10, 2:51 pm, Ross <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > Initially I was simply doing: > > currs = [u'$', u'£', u'€', u'¥'] > aFile = open(thisFile, 'r') > for mline in aFile: # mline might be "£5.50" > if item[0] in currs: > item = item[1:] >
Don't you love it when someone solves their own problem? Posting a reply here so that other poor chumps like me can get around this... I found I could import codecs that allow me to read the file with my desired encoding. Huzzah! Instead of opening the file with a standard aFile = open(thisFile, 'r') I instead ensure I've imported the codecs: import codecs ... and then I used a specific encoding on the file read: aFile = codecs.open(thisFile, encoding='utf-8') Then all my compares seem to work fine. If I'm off-base and kludgey here and should be doing something differently please give me a poke. Regards, Ross. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list