Reading unicode data through Python

Processing files containing unicode based characters requires using the codec library instead of the standard file processing libraries. The relevant code:

import codecs

file = codecs.open("file_with_unicode_data.txt", "r", "utf-8")
print file.readlines()
file.close()

Python Non-ASCII character '\xc3'

During a python script execution, if you get the following error:

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file text2term_topia.py on line 21, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

Add the following statement right at the begining, before all import statements.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Similar approach for errors with the term '\xe2'.