UTF-\d is not unicode. Unicode isn't an encoding, it's the decoded representation of a character encoding. [edit] clarified example >>> s = u'\xa5' # s

UTF-\d is not unicode. Unicode isn't an encoding, it's the decoded representation of a character encoding. [edit] clarified example >>> s = u'\xa5' # shiftjis decoding of \ >>> print s.encode('shiftjis') \ >>> print s.encode('utf-8') ¥