title: Comparing special characters in Python
body: <p>I have a string whose value is 'Opérations'. In my script I will read a file and do some comparisons. While comparing strings, the string that I have copied from the same source and placed in my python script DOES not equal to the same string that I receive when reading the same file in my script. Printing both strings give me 'Opérations'. However, when I encode it to utf-8 I notice the difference.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>b'Ope\xcc\x81rations'</li>
  <li>b'Op\xc3\xa9rations'</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My question is what do I do to ensure that the special character in my python script is the same as the file content's when comparing such strings.</p>