special charater in file causing trouble

[Thomas Thomas]

Hi All,   I need to process a file to create a hash.. the file contain a section similar to string MetaDataPrompt = "Discovery No"; string MetaDataFieldName = "Discovery No"; string MetaDataType = "string"; string MetaDataValue = "£500";   everything was working fine until recently I got an error and found that it is due to "£" character and the error generated when processing the hash ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) I assume that this happening because the hash values I have are asciii encoded and I need to convert to unicode somehow.. i tried some googling and found http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/unicode/python.html with not much luck in getting it work in my case. metaValue=unicode('fieldValues[1], errors='ignore') this will make the code work but i looses the "£" , I know that how it supposed to work   is there a way to handle such a situation  in python code snippet def _readXSTFilePoll(filename):     metaHash={}     if exists(filename):        if isfile(filename):            f = open(filename, "rb")            #infile = codecs.open(filename, "rb", encoding="utf-16")            #text = infile.read()            for line in f:               if (line.find("string MetaData") >1):                  metaSubHash={}                  while(line.find("string MetaData")>1):                     fieldValues=line.split('"')                     extendedMetaKey=fieldValues[0].strip();                     metaValue=fieldValues[1]                     print metaValue                     metaKeySplit=extendedMetaKey.split(' ')                     metaKeyList=metaKeySplit[1].split('MetaData')                     metaKey=metaKeyList[1]                     metaSubHash[metaKey]=metaValue                     if (metaKey=='Prompt'):                        hashKey=metaValue                        hashKey=hashKey.upper()                     line=f.next()                  metaHash[hashKey]=metaSubHash                    print "one section over"            print filename,metaHash            return metaHash             else:            return {}            print "I cannot see a file of this name"     else:         return {}   Thanks ----------------------------------------------------- Thomas Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone.  +64 7 855 8478 Fax.      +64 7 855 8871

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