a simple unicode question

[George Trojan]

A trivial one, this is the first time I have to deal with Unicode. I am 
trying to parse a string s='''48° 13' 16.80" N'''. I know the charset is 
"iso-8859-1". To get the degrees I did
>>> encoding='iso-8859-1'
>>> q=s.decode(encoding)
>>> q.split()
[u'48\xc2\xb0', u"13'", u'16.80"', u'N']
>>> r=q.split()[0]
>>> int(r[:r.find(unichr(ord('\xc2')))])
48
Is there a better way of getting the degrees?

George
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