title: Split \xef\xbb\xbf in a list read from a file
body: <p>I tried to read big data file.txt and split all the comma, point, etc, so I read the file with this code in Python:</p>
  
  <pre><code>file= open("file.txt","r")
  importantWords =[]
  for i in file.readlines():
      line = i[:-1].split(" ")
      for word in line:
          for j in word:
              word = re.sub('[\!@#$%^&amp;*-/,.;:]','',word)
              word.lower()
          if word not in stopwords.words('spanish'):
              importantWords.append(word)
  print importantWords
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and it printed <code>['\xef\xbb\xbfdataText1', 'dataText2' .. 'dataTextn']</code>.</p>
  
  <p>How can I clean that <code>\xef\xbb\xbf</code>?  I'm using Python 2.7.</p>