unicode_string = u'\u3042\u308a\u304c\u3068\u3046'

print unicode_string

print len(unicode_string)

file_path = r'/home/johann/Desktop' #Adjust as required (e.g. r'C:\documents')

import os

os.chdir(file_path)

my_string = open('myfile.txt', 'rb').read().rstrip()

print len(my_string)

my_unicode_string = my_string.decode('utf-8')

print len(my_unicode_string)

import codecs

my_new_string = codecs.open('myfile.txt', 'rb', 'utf-8').read().rstrip()

print len(my_new_string)

print 'this is a string'[0]

print 'this is a string'[0:4]