title: Python : number of characters in text file
body: <p>I am trying to get the number of characters in a file.
  But when I use 'len' on an imported txt file, it returns the number of bits instead of the number of characters.</p>
  
  <pre><code>text1=open('text1.txt','r+').read()
  print len(text1)
  
  1256664
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I fix this?</p>