I came across ftfy via this post http://ianozsvald.com/2015/01/10/a-first-approach-to-automatic-text-data-cleaning/ and thought others here might be interested in it, so here's the direct link http://ftfy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. -- My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask what you can do for our language. Mark Lawrence