I spent a whole day trying to figure out why I could not load a file with the slurp technique because of this error message:
unrecognised character \xC2 at the end of line
It was not until I found this string of comments that I realized my problem was due to my having cut and pasted code from a web page into linux gedit and the underscore character from the cut code was different from the underscore needed on my linux system.
SO WHEN IN DOUBT try TYPING the copied code into your program.
THANKS SO MUCH FOR THIS WEB SITE.
Off to make a contribution now.