Create a list from a txt file with all italian words, python -

i downloaded here ( https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=128318&package_id=141110 ) dictionary italian words. wanted add them list use randint(0, list.count()) use random italian word string. little program "guess word". used guide: creating list of every word text file without spaces, punctuation see achieve this, received ascii code errors. tried replace odd characters (‡ËÈÏÚ) effective characters (àèèìù) , removed first line of thesaurus.txt file, still same ascii error. thank in advance help, i'm newbie in python. oh, , here's code, can recreate ascii error (you can download .txt file link above).

import re random import * file = open('thesaurus.txt', 'r') # .lower() returns version upper case characters replaced lower case characters. text = file.read().lower() file.close() # replaces not lowercase letter, space, or apostrophe space: text = re.sub('[^a-z\ \']+', " ", text) words = list(text.split())  word = random.choice(words)  wordlist = list(word)  guess = [] prove = []  l in range(len(word)):     guess.append("_") attempts_remaining = 6 print (guess) print("you have", attempts_remaining, "attempts") guessed = 0 while guessed < len(word) , attempts_remaining != 0:     if attempts_remaining != 0:         guessed_this_time = 0         prova = input("write letter: ")         prove.append(prova)          if prove.count(prova) > 1:             prova = input("you've tried letter! try another: ")           l in range(len(word)):               if wordlist[l] == prova:                  guess[l] = wordlist [l]                 guessed += 1                 guessed_this_time += 1                   else:                 pass         if guessed_this_time == 0:             attempts_remaining -= 1             print(attempts_remaining, "attempts remaining")         elif guessed == len(word):             print("you guessed it!")         print(guess)     if attempts_remaining == 0:         print("you lost, word was", word) 

the error is:

traceback (most recent call last):   file "/users/user/documents/python/impiccato/impiccato.py", line 5, in <module>     text = file.read().lower()   file "/library/frameworks/python.framework/versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode     return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0] unicodedecodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x88 in position 2170: ordinal not in range(128) 

edit: "solved" moving txt content .py , calling way:

text = """ here's list (the whole thing 19414ln lol) ... """ words = \ re.sub('[^a-z\ \']+', " ", text).split() # stores secret words in list 

this way commas replaced spaces.

it encoding. don't know website had set as, not want. open in favorite editor , set encoding utf-8. still won't work, because of bug: .count() not give amount of items. want len(words).