title: Special characters appearing as question marks
body: <p>Using the Python programming language, I'm having trouble outputting characters such as å, ä and ö. The following code gives me a question mark (?) as output, not an å:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#coding: iso-8859-1
  input = "å"
  print input
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The following code lets you input random text. The for-loop goes through each character of the input, adds them to the string variable a and then outputs the resulting string. This code works correctly; you can input å, ä and ö and the output will still be correct. For example, "år" outputs "år" as expected.</p>
  
  <pre><code>#coding: iso-8859-1
  input = raw_input("Test: ")
  a = ""
  for i in range(0, len(input)):
      a = a + input[i]
  print a
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What's interesting is that if I change <code>input = raw_input("Test: ")</code> to <code>input = "år"</code>, it will output a question mark (?) for the "å".</p>
  
  <pre><code>#coding: iso-8859-1
  input = "år"
  a = ""
  for i in range(0, len(input)):
       a = a + input[i]
  print a
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>For what it's worth, I'm using TextWrangler, and my document's character encoding is set to ISO Latin 1. What causes this? How can I solve the problem?</p>