Unicode string handling problem

[Richard Schulman]

The following program fragment works correctly with an ascii input
file.

But the file I actually want to process is Unicode (utf-16 encoding).
The file must be Unicode rather than ASCII or Latin-1 because it
contains mixed Chinese and English characters.

When I run the program below I get an attribute_count of zero, which
is incorrect for the input file, which should give a value of fifteen
or sixteen. In other words, the count function isn't recognizing the
", characters in the line being read. Here's the program:

in_file = open("c:\\pythonapps\\in-graf1.my","rU")
try:
    # Skip the first line; make the second available for processing
    in_file.readline()
    in_line = readline()
    attribute_count = in_line.count('",')
    print attribute_count
finally:
    in_file.close()

Any suggestions?

Richard Schulman
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