title: Python regex £ sign
body: <p>I'm reading from a text file which contains pound signs (£):</p>
  
  <pre><code>f = open(file, 'r')
  string = f.read()
  f.close()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Along with some other regex operations, I want to remove these pound signs, and write the string to a new file. The closest I've got to making this work is the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>n = re.compile(unichr(163))
  string = n.sub('', string)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This seems to find the pound signs correctly, but instead of replacing them with nothing, the <code>£</code> are converted this symbol: <code>Â</code></p>
  
  <p>Anyone have any idea what's going on?</p>