Greetings Francis, You have entered the Unicode or multiple character set zone. This is the deep end of the pool, and even experienced practitioners have difficulty here. Fortunately, Python eases the burden on you, but this still requires some care.
: Given a simple text file of departments, capitals, longitude and : latitude separated by commas Side notes--if you are dealing with geographic hierarchies, you may wish to consider using some publicly 'standard' available hierarchy. Since you are mailing from a .state.ny.us address, I might guess that you are working inside a context in which you may not have control over the source of the geographic hierachical data, however, I'll point out the following: * GeoNames: http://www.geonames.org/ * GNIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Names_Information_System Apologies to somebody with actual brains who said this, but: The great thing about standards, is that you have so many to choose from. OK, so that's unrelated to your direct question. You have a few capitals and latlongs that you want to read from a comma-separated file. : Ahuachapán,Ahuachapán,-89.8450,13.9190 : Cabañas,Sensuntepeque,-88.6300,13.8800 : Cuscatlán,Cojutepeque,-88.9333,13.7167 : : 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: : : The capital of Cabañas is Sensuntepeque : : while preserving the non-English characters : : now, for example, I get : : Cabañas You don't show even a snippet of code. If you are asking for help here, it is good form to show us your code. Since you don't state how you are reading the data and how you are printing the data, we can't help much. Here are some tips: * Consider learning how to use the csv module, particularly in your case, csv.reader (as Ramit Prasad has already suggested). * Consider checking the bytestream to see if the bytes produced on output are the same as on input (also, read the text that Mark Tompkins indicated and learn to distinguish Unicode from UTF-8). * Report back to the list the version of Python you are using. [Different versions of Python have subtly different handling of non ASCII character set data, but this should probably not be an issue for the more obvious issue you are showing above.] We can have no idea what your ultimate goal is with the data, but can help you much more if you show us the code. Here's a sample of what I would/could do (Python 2.6.5): import csv reader = csv.reader(open('input-data.txt'),delimiter=',') for row in reader: print 'The capital of %s is %s' % (row[0], row[1],) The above is trivial, but if you would like some more substantive assistance, you should describe your problem in a bit more detail. -Martin -- Martin A. Brown http://linux-ip.net/
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