Handling non-standard American English Characters and Symbols in a CSV, using Python

Question

I have a list of store names, with a few thousand names, some of which have non-standard American English characters that are posing a problem.

For example, my inpu

Answer 1

You can use decode and encode:

print a
péché
Álak
óundle

print a.decode('latin9').encode('utf8'),
péché
Ãlak
óundle

I had to do the reverse...