title: General Unicode/UTF-8 support for csv files in Python 2.6
body: <p>The csv module in Python doesn't work properly when there's UTF-8/Unicode involved. I have found, in the <a href="http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Python documentation</a> and on other webpages, snippets that work for specific cases but you have to understand well what encoding you are handling and use the appropriate snippet.</p>
  
  <p>How can I read and write both strings and Unicode strings from .csv files that "just works" in Python 2.6? Or is this a limitation of Python 2.6 that has no simple solution?</p>