title: How to get Python 3 to match '%'?
body: <p>I have a file with one line beginning as:</p>
  
  <p><code>%i,the,you,to,and,a,me,it,not,in,my,is</code></p>
  
  <p>In the code to read lines from the file, there is an if statement</p>
  
  <pre><code>if line[0] == '%':
      &lt;do something&gt;
  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, even though the character is there, it never matches.</p>
  
  <p>Anyone have any ideas what might be happening here?  Is this possibly an encoding issue?</p>