title: How do I use characters that are not supported by default in Python?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5552555/unicodedecodeerror-invalid-continuation-byte">UnicodeDecodeError, invalid continuation byte</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I am trying to use characters such as <code>á</code> and <code>ô</code> in a python generated PDF. The program uses the dateutil module (and several others) to generate a PDF calendar (with images). The calendar is laid out with Latex.</p>
  
  <p>My aim is to create calendars in French, but the array of month names in French includes characters which appear to be not recognised by python.</p>
  
  <p>During generation the program prints <code>SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 0: unexpected end of data</code> in the command line.</p>
  
  <p>How can I tell python to use these characters?</p>
  
  <p>If it helps the array is:<pre>FRENCH_MONTHS = [u'NotAMonth', u'Janvier', u'Février', u'Mars', u'Avril', u'Mai', u'Juin', u'Juillet', u'Aôut', u'Septembre', u'Octobre', u'Novembre', u'Décembre']</pre></p>
  
  <p>Also used:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>MPS to PDF converter</li>
  </ul>