Hi Martin, Thanks very much. Your def comma_separated_utf8(items): approach raises an exception in codecs.py, so I tried = u", ".join(word_info + parse + gloss), which works perfectly. So I want to understand exactly why this works. word_info and parse and gloss are all tuples. does str convert the three into an ascii string? but the join method retains their unicode status.
In the text file, the unicode characters appear perfectly, so I'm very happy. cheers matthew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list