Jerry, I can tell from your code that you are using Python 2. If you are a new Python programmer, and you do not HAVE to use Python 2, use Python 3 instead.
In Python 3, text objects are something called "Unicode" rather than just sequences of bytes. Unicode makes it much easier to handle characters which are not part of the English alphabet. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
