Unicode support in python

[sonald]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> >    http://www.google.com/search?q=python+unicode
>
> (and before anyone starts screaming about how they hate RTFM replies, look
> at the search result)
>
> </F>
Thanks!! but i have already tried this...
and let me tell you what i am trying now...

I have added the following line in the script

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

I have also modified the site.py in ./Python24/Lib as
def setencoding():
    """Set the string encoding used by the Unicode implementation.  The
    default is 'ascii', but if you're willing to experiment, you can
    change this."""
    encoding = "utf-8" # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()
    if 0:
        # Enable to support locale aware default string encodings.
        import locale
        loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
        if loc[1]:
            encoding = loc[1]
    if 0:
        # Enable to switch off string to Unicode coercion and implicit
        # Unicode to string conversion.
        encoding = "undefined"
    if encoding != "ascii":
        # On Non-Unicode builds this will raise an AttributeError...
        sys.setdefaultencoding(encoding) # Needs Python Unicode build !

Now when I try to validate the data in the text file
say abc.txt (saved as with utf-8 encoding) containing either english or
russian text,

some junk character (box like) is added as the first character
what must be the reason for this?
and how do I handle it?