unicode handling

On Thu, 3 Aug 2006 17:04:08 +1200, "Thomas Thomas" <thomas@mindz-i.co.nz> wr

>If you have control over writing data, I would
>suggest writing to utf-8

Na the file is something i receive extenally and dropped into a
specific location from where the application reads..

Then you need to figure out what encoding the file is using.

it will be as starightforward as copying and pasting the content below
onto notepad
------------------------
string MetaDataPrompt = "Discovery No";
string MetaDataFieldName = "Discovery No";
string MetaDataType = "string";
string MetaDataValue = "£500";
string MetaDataPrompt = "comments";
string MetaDataFieldName = "Comments";
string MetaDataType = "string";
string MetaDataValue = "Energy Scope £500";
-----------------------------------------------------

and try reading it from that file..

If you do that, you will have an 8-bit file encoded with whatever your
system's default encoding is. It is NOT a Unicode file. The issue is
that the £ sign is not in the same place in every encoding. If you
wrote that file, put it on a floppy, moved it to a Chinese system and
tried to read it, it would show something very different.

Because of that, Python, by default, does not assume an encoding. When
it encounters a byte outside of the standard ASCII range (0-127), it pukes.

It is quite likely that your file is iso-8859-1. Try:
   inifile = codec.open(filename, 'r', encoding='iso-8859-1')

···

--
Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.