Novice: replacing strings with unicode variables in a list

[aine_canby at yahoo.com]

Hi,

Im totally new to Python so please bare with me.

Data is entered into my program using the folling code -

str = raw_input(command)
words = str.split()

for word in words:
  word = unicode(word,'latin-1')
  word.encode('utf8')

This gives an error:

  File "C:\Python25\lib\encodings\cp850.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\x94' in
position 0
: character maps to <undefined>

but the following works.

str = raw_input(command)
words = str.split()

for word in words:
  uni = u""
  uni = unicode(word,'latin-1')
  uni.encode('utf8')

so the problem is that I want replace my list with unicode variables.
Or maybe I should create a new list.

I also tried this:

for word in words[:]:
					word = u""
					word = unicode(word,'latin-1')
					word.encode('utf8')
					print word

but got TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported.

What should I be doing?

Thanks for your help,

Aine.