I have this text in a file - Recuérdame (notice it's a French word). When I read this file with a python script, I get this text as Recu&#xE9;rdame.
I read it as a unicode string. Do I need to find what the encoding of the text is & decode this? or is my terminal playing tricks on me?
Working with xlrd, I have in a line 
...xl_data.find(str(cell_value))...
which gives the error:"'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xdf' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)".
All suggestions in the forums have been useless for my german words.
But changing into:
...xl_data.find(cell.value)...
gives no error.
So, I suppose using strings as arguments in certain commands with xldr has specific encoding problems.
Python Text Encoding