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I have a parser I am building with python and, unfortunately, people
have decided to put unicode characters in the files I am parsing.
The parser seems to have a fit when I search for one \uXXXX symbol,
and there is another unicode symbol in the file. In this case, a
search and replace for © with a µ in the file causes the infamous
ordinal error.
My quick-fix, because they have good context, is to change them both
to "UTF8", and then attempt to replace the UTF8 at the end with the
original µ. The problem is that I am getting a µ when I try to
re-insert using \u00b5 which is the UTF8 code.
Words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

Todd Jenista wrote:

> I have a parser I am building with python and, unfortunately, people
> have decided to put unicode characters in the files I am parsing.

Maybe this helps you. It converts a latin1 byte to unicode
and then converts it to utf8.
>>> s="ä"
>>> s_u=unicode(s, "latin1")
>>> s_utf8=s_u.encode("utf8")

You need to know the encoding of the input (utf8, utf16) .

thomas