Newbie question about text encoding

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Wed, 25 Feb 2015 02:03:16 +1100, Chris Angelico writes:
>On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:55 AM, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:
>> In a message of Tue, 24 Feb 2015 06:25:24 -0500, Dave Angel writes:
>>>But utf-8 does not seem to be the right encoding for that bytestring.
>>>So you'll need a form like:
>>>     mystring = rec.decode(encoding='xxx')
>>>
>>>for some value of xxx.
>>
>>>DaveA
>>
>> And the xxx you want is "latin1"
>
>Can you be sure it's Latin-1? I'm not certain of that. In any case, I
>never advocate fixing encoding problems by "just do this and it'll all
>go away"; you have to understand your data before you can decode it.
>
>ChrisA

I can, I speak French and I recognise the data.  It's French place names,
places where sporting events are held. :)

Laura