There are a few points to consider.
A \u2018 character may appear only as a fragment of representation of a unicode string in Python, e.g. if you write:
>>> text = u'‘'
>>> print repr(text)
u'\u2018'
Now if you simply want to print the unicode string prettily, just use unicode's encode method:
>>> text = u'I don\u2018t like this'
>>> print text.encode('utf-8')
I don‘t like this
To make sure that every line from any file would be read as unicode, you'd better use the codecs.open function instead of just open, which allows you to specify file's encoding:
>>> import codecs
>>> f1 = codecs.open(file1, "r", "utf-8")
>>> text = f1.read()
>>> print type(text)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> print text.encode('utf-8')
I don‘t like this