UTF-8 problem in python when reading chars

Question

I\'m using Python 2.5. What is going on here? What have I misunderstood? How can I fix it?

in.txt:

Stäckövérfløw

code.py

Answer 1

Check this out:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import pprint
f = open('unicode.txt','r')
for line in f:
    print line
    pprint.pprint(line)
    for i in line:
        print i,
f.close()

It returns this:

Stäckövérfløw
'St\xc3\xa4ck\xc3\xb6v\xc3\xa9rfl\xc3\xb8w'
S t ? ? c k ? ? v ? ? r f l ? ? w

The thing is that the file is just being read as a string of bytes. Iterating over them splits the multibyte characters into nonsensical byte values.