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I have input strings that are comprised of characters, including double and single quotes " and '

B@SS$*JU(PQ AD&^%$^@!$ %()%@@DDSFD"*")(# ABD*E@(%J^&@

however, when I open the above input from a text file and just print it, the double quotes " in the third line get printed as \xe2\x80\x9d

I am aiming to do a simple character count:

B 2 @ 3 S 2 $ 3 etc.

so I want to be able to output

" 3

in the above list. Should I replace the double quotes with something so I can count them and print out the count?

Thanks a lot.

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\xe2\x80\x9d

Is a unicode value for "special" double quotes. You could decode from UTF-8 into Unicode to convert this into a "single" Unicode character. 

>>> print "\xe2\x80\x9d".decode("utf-8") ” >>> len("\xe2\x80\x9d".decode("utf-8")) 1

If you are using Python 3:

>>> print(b"\xe2\x80\x9d".decode('utf8')) ” >>> len(b"\xe2\x80\x9d".decode("utf-8")) 1

So for your file that you are counting (in Python 2):

from collections import defaultdict with open("filename", 'r') as f: for text in f: decoded = text.decode("utf-8") count = defaultdict(int) for i in decoded: count[i] += 1
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5 Comments

thanks a lot, Martin - this definitely helps. Now when I decode each line to utf8, then do a character count, the double quotes appear as u'\u201d' and again they won't print. Is there a way around that?
How are you printing it? Also, are you using Python2 or Python3?
I'm using python 2.76 and I'm creating a dictionary of key-value pairs for the characters counts and then printing the keys. So the double quote gets stored as u'\u201d': 3, and when I try to print the keys it throws the error: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u201d' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Are you using str function somewhere by any chance? What does your print code look like?
you're a genius - I must have put the str(key) in there at some point when I was playing around. Thank you so much!!!

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