python - How should I convert a string containing unicode characters to unicode? -

i thought dominated unicode stuff in python 2, seems there's don't understand. have user input html goes python script:

a = "m\xe9dico"

i want médico (that means doctor). convert unicode i'm doing:

a.decode("utf-8")

or:

unicode(a, "utf-8")

but throwing:

unicodeencodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

how can achieve this?

this not utf-8:

print txt.decode('iso8859-1') out[14]: médico

if want utf-8 string, use:

txt.decode('iso8859-1').encode('utf-8') out[15]: 'm\xc3\xa9dico'

Silver