error when printing a UTF-8 string (python 2.6.2)

[fab at slick.airforce-one.org]

Hello.

I read a string from an utf-8 file:

fichierLaTeX = codecs.open(sys.argv[1], "r", "utf-8")
s = fichierLaTeX.read()
fichierLaTeX.close()

I can then print the string without error with 'print s'.

Next I parse this string:

def parser(s):
  i = 0
  while i < len(s):
    if s[i:i+1] == '\\':
       i += 1
       if s[i:i+1] == '\\':
         print "backslash"
       elif s[i:i+1] == '%':
    	  print "pourcentage"
       else:
          if estUnCaractere(s[i:i+1]):
	    motcle = ""
	    while estUnCaractere(s[i:i+1]):
	      motcle += s[i:i+1]
	      i += 1
       	   print "mot-clé '"+motcle+"'"

but when I run this code, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./versOO.py", line 115, in <module>
      parser(s)
        File "./versOO.py", line 105, in parser
	    print "mot-clé '"+motcle+"'"
	    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in
position 6: ordinal not in range(128)

What must I do to solve this?

Thanks!

-- 
Fabrice DELENTE