Strange problems with encoding

[Michael Hudson]

"Sebastian Meyer" <s.meyer at technology-network.de> writes:

> Hi newsgroup,
> 
> i am trying to replace german special characters in strings like
>     str = re.sub('ö', 'oe', str)

1) str is the name of a builtin -- often a bad idea to use that as a
   variable name.

2) I presume `str' is a unicode string?  Try writing the literal as
   u'ö' instead (and adding the appropriate coding cookie to your
   source file if using Python 2.3).  Or I guess you could write it

       u'\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}'

Cheers,
mwh

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