Works now. I must have had a transcription error. Thankyou

@CVP, you do seem to understand but it doesn’t change the output. Syntax is good but the printed line is still:

Hello “Friend”

I have a data file that I sent to UTF8 which puts the inverted comma character in its output.
How do I detect and remove the “ character from a string? Trying to define is as “”” i.e. 3 “ in a row, is overidden by the editor to become 4 “ in a row. It will not treat the “ character as a character.

I much appreciate. You have helped me around an obstacle

I see so I could work on that utf8 more easily

It doesn't like
print (st)

Thanks CVP. That has me onto something.
I am data scraping. Maybe better off using a package like beautifulsoup?

CVP, so no printed string slice takes the html one character at a time. It combines them into groups and adds apostrophes.

#The "with" statement overflows into the next line due to this narrow comment box

import urllib.request
tda=str
with urllib.request.urlopen("https://www.asx.com.au/asx/statistics/todayAnns.do") as response
tda=response.read()

#Print the entire html string so I know what is in it
#The output of this print statement starts:
#b'\r\n\r\n\r\n<!DOCTYPE

print (tda)

#Separately print the first 5 characters in the html string
#The output of this is, including spaces between items:
#b'\r' b'\n' b'\r' b'\n' b'\r'

print (tda[0:1],tda[1:2],tda[2:3],tda[3:4],tda[4:5])

#Print the first 5 characters in the string
#The output of this is:
#b'\r\n\r\n\r'

print(tda[0:5])

I downloaded a webpage successfuly which looks correct in content. When printing slices the characters are different.

Specifically, when I print the first character it shows the first plus the next 3 characters and an apostrophe on the end. So one character becomes 5 characters.

On printing longer slices of the webpage the number of characters is also greater and the apostrophe is always added on the end.

What is happening?

Tom