Dealing with unicode and strings in Python

unicode.py

# Deal exclusively with unicode objects as much as possible
# by decoding things to unicode objects when you first get them and
# encoding them as necessary on the way out.
# https://stackoverflow.com/a/6048203

>>> s = 'abc'
>>> type(s)
<type 'str'>

>>> u  = u'abc'  # note the u prefix
>>> type(u)
<type 'unicode'>

# convert unicode to string by encoding
>>> s = u.encode('utf8')
>>> type(s)
<type 'str'>

# convert string to unicode by decoding
>>> u1 = s.decode('utf-8')
>>> type(u1)
<type 'unicode'>