Hi. I'm just beginning to learn Python. My tutorial gives an example how to convert a unicode string to utf-8: >>> u"äöü".encode('utf-8') '\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc' If i try to execute this command, i get the error message: "UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)" Why? thanks and regards, Jan