Read special characters from .txt file in python

Question

The goal of this code is to find the frequency of words used in a book.

I am tying to read in the text of a book but the following line keeps throwing my code off:

Answer 1

When you open a text file in python, the encoding is ANSI by default, so it doesn't contain your é chartecter. Try

word_file = open ("./words.txt", "r", encoding='utf-8')