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

Try:

def parseString(st):
    st = st.encode("ascii", "replace")

    # rest of code here

The new error you are getting is because you are calling isalpha on an int (i.e. a number)

Try this:

for ch in st:
    ch = str(ch)
    if (n for n in (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0) if n in ch) or ' ' in ch or ch.isspace() or ch == u'\xe9':

        print (ch)