Read special characters from .txt file in python

The goal of this code is to find the frequency of words used in a book. I am tying to read in the text of a book but the following line keeps throwing my code off: precious protégés. No, gentlemen; he'll always show 'em a clean pair specifically the é character I have looked at the following documentation, but I don't quite understand it: https://docs.python.org/3.4/howto/unicode.html Heres my code: ``` import string # Create word dictionary from the comprehensive word list word_dict = {} def create_word_dict (): # open words.txt and populate dictionary word_file = open ("./words.txt", "r") for line in word_file: line = line.strip() word_dict[line] = 1 # Removes punctuation marks from a string def parseString (st): st = st.encode("ascii", "replace") new_line = "" st = st.strip() for ch in st: ch = str(ch) if (n for n in (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0)) in ch or ' ' in ch or ch.isspace() or ch == u'\xe9': print (ch) new_line += ch else: new_line += "" # now remove all instances of 's or ' at end of line new_line = new_line.strip() print (new_line) if (new_line[-1] == "'"): new_line = new_line[:-1] new_line.replace("'s", "") # Conversion from ASCII codes back to useable text message = new_line decodedMessage = "" for item in message.split(): decodedMessage += chr(int(item)) print (decodedMessage) return new_line # Returns a dictionary of words and their frequencies def getWordFreq (file): # Open file for reading the book.txt book = open (file, "r") # create an empty set for all Capitalized words cap_words = set() # create a dictionary for words book_dict = {} total_words = 0 # remove all punctuation marks other than '[not s] for line in book: line = line.strip() if (len(line) > 0): line = parseString (line) word_list = line.split() # add words to the book dictionary for word in word_list: total_words += 1 if (word in book_dict): book_dict[word] = book_dict[word] + 1 else: book_dict[word] = 1 print (book_dict) # close the file book.close() def main(): wordFreq1 = getWordFreq ("./Tale.txt") print (wordFreq1) main() ``` The error that I received is as follows: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "Books.py", line 80, in <module> main() File "Books.py", line 77, in main wordFreq1 = getWordFreq ("./Tale.txt") File "Books.py", line 60, in getWordFreq line = parseString (line) File "Books.py", line 36, in parseString decodedMessage += chr(int(item)) OverflowError: Python int too large to convert to C long ```