Degree character (°) encoding/decoding - python-3.x

Question

I am on windows platform and I use Python 3.
I have a text file which contains degree characters (°)
I want to read the whole text file, do some processing and write it back with the performed modifications. Here is sample of my code :
with io.open('myTextFile.txt',encoding='ASCII') as f:
for item in allItem:
i=0
myData = pd.DataFrame(data=np.zeros((n,1)))
for line in f:
myRegex = "(AD"+item+")"
if re.match(myRegex,line):
myData.loc[i,0] = line
i+=1
myData = myData[(myData.T != 0).any()]
myData = myData.append(pd.DataFrame(["\n"],index=[myData.index[-1]+1]))
myData = myData[0].map(lambda x: x.strip()).to_frame()
myData.to_csv('myModifiedTextFile.txt', header = False, index = False, mode='a', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, escapechar=' ', encoding = 'ASCII')
However I am getting unicode errors although I tried specifying encoding/decoding :
'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 512: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

ascii is not very useful here, since it only knows 128 characters, the ones you can find in this table. Notice there is no degree sign in that table. I am unsure what the actual encoding of your file is – Unicode and commonly used Windows code pages (1250/1252) have the degree sign at 0xB0.
I assume in your file, there is a degree sign at position 512 and it is causing the error. If this is the case, you need to be more specific with your encoding argument. Figure out which code page / encoding was used to save the file. Confirm this by looking up the code page and finding the degree sign at 0xE9.
If there is a different character at position 512 ("é" is a good candidate), then simply specify an encoding like cp1250, cp1252, or cp1257.