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 charac

Answer 1

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