@ClackHack This works, thanks. I still don’t really understand what was going on to cause the encoding error. Isn’t ascii the same as utf-8?

I have a script that reads an ascii encoded text file, created within the Pythonista environment. However, when i execute the script on the text file, i get “error ascii codec cant decode byte 0xe2 in position 2154: ordinal n...”
Tracking the bug seems to show it to be an error not in .read()

I try the same script and text file and 20 others like it that i have created on my computer using the stock IDE, and I get no error.

How can I deal with this?

I can provide code and text files to recreate the error.