Handling text lines from files with some (few) starnge chars

[python at bdurham.com]

Chris,

> Specify the encoding of the text when opening the file using the `encoding` parameter. For Windows-1252 for example:
> 
> your_file = open("path/to/file.ext", 'r', encoding='cp1252')

This looks similar to the codecs module's functionality. Do you know if
the codecs module is still required in Python 3.x?

Thank you,
Malcolm