You need to make sure that your strings are unicode strings, not plain strings (plain strings are like byte arrays).
Example:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ' >>> type(string) <type 'str'> # do this instead: # (note the u in front of the ', this marks the character sequence as a unicode literal) >>> string = u'\xd0\xd1\xd2\xd3\xd4\xd5\xd6\xd7\xd8\xd9\xda\xdb\xdc\xdd\xde\xdf\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4\xe5\xe6\xe7\xe8\xe9\xea\xeb\xec\xed\xee\xef\xf0\xf1\xf2\xf3\xf4\xf5\xf6\xf7\xf8\xf9\xfa\xfb\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff\xc0\xc1\xc2\xc3' # or: >>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'.decode('utf-8') # ... but be aware that the latter will only work if the terminal (or source file) has utf-8 encoding # ... it is a best practice to use the \xNN form in unicode literals, as in the first example >>> type(string) <type 'unicode'> >>> print string ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂà >>> rePat = re.compile(u'[^\xc3\x91\xc3\x83\xc3\xaf]',re.UNICODE) >>> print rePat.sub("", string) Ã
When reading from a file, string = open('filename.txt').read() reads a byte sequence.
To get the unicode content, do: string = unicode(open('filename.txt').read(), 'encoding'). Or: string = open('filename.txt').read().decode('encoding').
The codecs module can decode unicode streams (such as files) on-the-fly.
Do a google search for python unicode. Python unicode handling can be a bit hard to grasp at first, it pays to read up on it.
I live by this rule: "Software should only work with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output." (from http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode)
I also recommend: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
