Unicode problem.... as always

[Todd Jenista]

I have a parser I am building with python and, unfortunately, people
have decided to put unicode characters in the files I am parsing.
The parser seems to have a fit when I search for one \uXXXX symbol,
and there is another unicode symbol in the file. In this case, a
search and replace for © with a µ in the file causes the infamous
ordinal error.
My quick-fix, because they have good context, is to change them both
to "UTF8", and then attempt to replace the UTF8 at the end with the
original µ. The problem is that I am getting a µ when I try to
re-insert using \u00b5 which is the UTF8 code.
Words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.