>I would like to know to how to read in the file and then access arbitary rows >in the file, so that I can print a line such as: > Cabañas,Sensuntepeque,-88.6300,13.8800 >The capital of Cabañas is Sensuntepeque
>while preserving the non-English characters >now, for example, I get >Cabañas Make sure to open the file with correct encoding or convert in your program. Incorrect encoding is a very likely reason why you get funky characters (or not having the appropriate codepages/languages installed). According to the internet you can open the file and specify the encoding all at once. http://docs.python.org/library/codecs.html#codecs.open >>>import codecs >>>f = codecs.open("test", "r", "utf-8") The list of standard codecs is on that page at 7.8.3. You can also manually convert a string, but that is more of a pain..and you would still need to know the codec. As for the rest of the problem, I would suggest you take a quick peek at the csv module which will parse your data for you. Ramit Ramit Prasad | JPMorgan Chase Investment Bank | Currencies Technology 712 Main Street | Houston, TX 77002 work phone: 713 - 216 - 5423 -- This email is confidential and subject to important disclaimers and conditions including on offers for the purchase or sale of securities, accuracy and completeness of information, viruses, confidentiality, legal privilege, and legal entity disclaimers, available at http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/disclosures/email. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor