I'm a newbie at python, so I don't really understand how your answer solves my unicode problem.
I have done more reading on unicode and then tried my code in IDLE rather than WING IDE, and discovered that it works fine in IDLE, so I think WING has a problem with unicode. For example, in WING this code returns an error: a={'a':u'\u0254'} print a['a'] UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0254' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) but in IDLE it correctly prints open o So, assuming I now work in IDLE, all I want help with is how to read in an ascii string and convert its letters to various unicode values and save the resulting 'string' to a utf-8 text file. Is this clear? so in pseudo code 1. F is converted to \u0254, $ is converted to \u0283, C is converted to \u02A6\02C1, etc. (i want to do this using a dictionary TRANSLATE={'F':u'\u0254', etc) 2. I read in a file with lines like: F$ FCF$ $$C$ etc 3. I convert this to \u0254\u0283 \u0254\u02A6\02C1\u0254 etc 4. i save the results in a new file when i read the new file in a unicode editor (EmEditor), i don't see \u0254\u02A6\02C1\u0254, but I see the actual characters (open o, esh, ts digraph, modified letter reversed glottal stop, etc. I'm sure this is straightforward but I can't get it to work. All help appreciated! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list