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From: Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de>
Subject: Re: how to get my character?
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:05:30 +0100
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Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.python:19484

contro opinion wrote:

> how can i get "你好" from '\xc4\xe3\xba\xc3' ?

>>> print '\xc4\xe3\xba\xc3'.decode("gbk")
你好

General rule: use the decode() method to convert from bytestring to unicode 
and encode() to convert from unicode to bytestring.

bytestring.encode(x) will implicitly try 
bytestring.decode("ascii").encode(x) which is likely to fail.