I don't exactly know what is going on, but '\x96' is the encoding for u'\N{en dash}' (a character that looks like the ASCII dash, u'\N{hyphen-minus}', u'\x45') in the following windows code pages: cp1250 cp1251 cp1252 cp1253 cp1254 cp1255 cp1256 cp1257 cp1258 cp874
Windows is clearly doing something clever. Jeff
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