A resilient, actually working CSV implementation for non-ascii?

Question

[Update] Appreciate the answers and input all around, but working code would be most welcome. If you can supply code that can read the sample files you are

Answer 1

I don't know if you've already tried this, but in the example section for the official Python documentation for the csv module, you'll find a pair of classes; UnicodeReader and UnicodeWriter. They worked fine for me so far.

Correctly detecting the encoding of a file seems to be a very hard problem. You can read the discussion in this StackOverflow thread.