a simple unicode question

[George Trojan]

A trivial one, this is the first time I have to deal with Unicode. I am 
trying to parse a string s='''48° 13' 16.80" N'''. I know the charset is 
"iso-8859-1". To get the degrees I did
 >>> encoding='iso-8859-1'
 >>> q=s.decode(encoding)
 >>> q.split()
[u'48\xc2\xb0', u"13'", u'16.80"', u'N']
 >>> r=q.split()[0]
 >>> int(r[:r.find(unichr(ord('\xc2')))])
48

Is there a better way of getting the degrees?

George