Python read variable with French characters from file - python-2.7

Question

I have a set of text files in which variables are stored, which I am trying to read into Python. As long as the variables do not contain any French characters, e.g. é, ç, etc. The following piece of code works well:
#!/usr/bin/python
import imp
def getVarFromFile(filename):
f=open (filename, 'rt')
global data
data = imp.load_source('data', " ", f)
f.close()
return()
def main():
getVarFromFile('test.txt')
print data.Title
print data.Language
print data.Summary
return()
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
Example output:
me#mypc:$ ./readVar.py
Monsieur Flaubert
French
A few lines of text.
However when the text file contains French characters, for instance:
Title = "Monsieur Flaubert"
Language = "Français"
Summary = "Quelques lignes de texte en Français. é à etc."
I am getting the following error for which I cannot find a solution:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./tag.py", line 30, in <module>
main()
File "./tag.py", line 22, in main
getVarFromFile('test.txt')
File "./tag.py", line 15, in getVarFromFile
data = imp.load_source('data', " ", f)
File " ", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file on line 2, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details
How can French (utf-8) characters be handled?
Thanks for your consideration and help to this Python-learner.

Answer 1

You could use codecs.open.
data = {}
with codecs.open('test.txt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
for line in f.readlines():
# Use some logic here to load each line into a dict, like:
key, value = line.split(" = ")
data[key] = value
This solution doesn't use imp, it requires that you implement your own logic to interpret the contents of the file.