8-bit cleanliness

[Rafael Cordones Marcos]

Hi,

I just started to use Python a few days ago because I got fed up of so much convoluted Perl code. ;)
Anyway, I have to read some text files and process the words appearing in them. I have discovered, to
my surprise, that accents like (á, à, ...) get replaced by a 4 character code. Is there any class/module/option
available to read *text* files with non english characters in them?

Maybe the Python installed in my Debian system is compiled with the wrong options.

Thanks for your time.

Rafa

-- 
Unix IS user-friendly, it just chooses its friends very carefully.