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')

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

The best way I could think of is to read each character as an ASCII value, into an array, and then take the char value. For example, 97 is ASCII for "a" and if you do char(97) it will output "a". Check out some online ASCII tables that provide values for special characters also.