title: How do I read in a CSV file that contains pound symbols?
body: <p>My file has a NUL byte at the beginning and I struggle with the "£" symbol</p>
  
  <pre><code>data_initial = codecs.open(filename, "rU", "utf-16")
  data = csv.DictReader((line.replace('\x00','') for line in data_initial), delimiter="\t")
      for row in data:
          print row
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the error: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in
    position 169: ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>BTW: it doesn't matter if I try to print this line out or not. I can print just '1' and the error remains the same. I do not know why it says it's an encoding error when it's probably a decoding error.</p>
  
  <p>In any case, how can I deal with the problem?</p>