title: write special characters into excel table by python package pyExcelerator/xlwt
body: <p>Task:<br>
  I generate formated excel tables from csv-files by using the python package pyExcelerator (comparable with xlwt). I need to be able to write less-than-or-equal-to (≤) and greater-than-or-equal-to (≥) signs.</p>
  
  <p>So far:<br>
  I can save my table as csv-files with UTF-8 encoding, so that I can view the special characters in my text editor, by adding the following line to my python source code:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>#! /usr/bin/env python
  # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Problem:<br>
  However, there is no option to choose UTF-8 as font in pyExcelerator's Font class. The only options are:  </p>
  
  <pre><code>CHARSET_ANSI_LATIN          = 0x00
  CHARSET_SYS_DEFAULT         = 0x01
  CHARSET_SYMBOL              = 0x02
  CHARSET_APPLE_ROMAN         = 0x4D
  CHARSET_ANSI_JAP_SHIFT_JIS  = 0x80
  CHARSET_ANSI_KOR_HANGUL     = 0x81
  CHARSET_ANSI_KOR_JOHAB      = 0x82
  CHARSET_ANSI_CHINESE_GBK    = 0x86
  CHARSET_ANSI_CHINESE_BIG5   = 0x88
  CHARSET_ANSI_GREEK          = 0xA1
  CHARSET_ANSI_TURKISH        = 0xA2
  CHARSET_ANSI_VIETNAMESE     = 0xA3
  CHARSET_ANSI_HEBREW         = 0xB1
  CHARSET_ANSI_ARABIC         = 0xB2
  CHARSET_ANSI_BALTIC         = 0xBA
  CHARSET_ANSI_CYRILLIC       = 0xCC
  CHARSET_ANSI_THAI           = 0xDE
  CHARSET_ANSI_LATIN_II       = 0xEE
  CHARSET_OEM_LATIN_I         = 0xFF
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Do any of these character sets contain the less-than-or-equal-to and greater-than-or-equal-to signs? If so, which on?<br>
  Which python encoding name corresponds to these sets?
  Is there another way for generating these special characters?</p>