title: Character reading from file in Python
body: <p>In a text file, there is a string "I don't like this".</p>
  
  <p>However, when I read it into a string, it becomes "I don\xe2\x80\x98t like this". I understand that \u2018 is the unicode representation of "'". I use </p>
  
  <pre><code>f1 = open (file1, "r")
  text = f1.read()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>command to do the reading.</p>
  
  <p>Now, is it possible to read the string in such a way that when it is read into the string, it is "I don't like this", instead of "I don\xe2\x80\x98t like this like this"?</p>
  
  <p>Second edit: I have seen some people use mapping to solve this problem, but really, is there no built-in conversion that does this kind of ANSI to unicode ( and vice versa) conversion?</p>