How to print/store non-ASCII characters (unicode?)

Question

I am reading in a large file of musicians. Many of these artists have strange characters in their names, as they may be from Germany or some other country with non-ASCII characters. I want to be able to both store these musician names in a list and print them to the console.

How do I print out these strings with strange characters, that are read in from a text file?

Answer 1

just include these two line at the top of your code

1. #!/usr/local/bin/python
2. # coding: latin-1

go to this link for further details

Answer 2

Let me help you help yourself.

First, go read Joel's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Then, it greatly depends whether you use Python 2 or 3:

• Python 2 Unicode HOWTO
• Python 3 Unicode HOWTO