Py3: Read file with Unicode characters

[Gnarlodious]

Attempting to read a file containing Unicode characters such as ±:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
5007: ordinal not in range(128)

I did succeed by converting all the characters to HTML entities such
as "±", but I want the characters to be the actual font in the
source file. What am I doing wrong? My understanding is that ALL
strings in Py3 are unicode so... confused.

-- Gnarlie