text = '''"Date","Remarque","Montant" "2012/3/22","DÉPÔT","50.00" "2012/3/23","VIREMENT VERS ÉPARGNE","-10.00" "2012/3/24","CAFÉ — €20 REÇU","-20.00"''' # Create UTF-8 file with open('sample-fr.utf8.csv', 'wb') as f: f.write(text.encode('utf-8')) # Create ISO-8859-1 file, replacing unsupported characters with open('sample-fr.iso8859-1.csv', 'wb') as f: f.write(text.encode('iso-8859-1', errors='replace')) # Create Windows-1252 file with open('sample-fr.cp1252.csv', 'wb') as f: f.write(text.encode('cp1252', errors='replace'))