A Unicode problem -HELP

[manstey]

I'm a newbie at python, so I don't really understand how your answer
solves my unicode problem.

I have done more reading on unicode and then tried my code in IDLE
rather than WING IDE, and discovered that it works fine in IDLE, so I
think WING has a problem with unicode. For example, in WING this code
returns an error:

a={'a':u'\u0254'}
print a['a']


UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0254' in
position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

but in IDLE it correctly prints open o

So, assuming I now work in IDLE, all I want help with is how to read in
an ascii string and convert its letters to various unicode values and
save the resulting 'string' to a utf-8 text file. Is this clear?

so in pseudo code
1.  F is converted to \u0254, $ is converted to \u0283, C is converted
to \u02A6\02C1, etc.
(i want to do this using a dictionary TRANSLATE={'F':u'\u0254', etc)
2. I read in a file with lines like:
F$
FCF$
$$C$ etc
3. I convert this to
\u0254\u0283
\u0254\u02A6\02C1\u0254 etc
4. i save the results in a new file

when i read the new file in a unicode editor (EmEditor), i don't see
\u0254\u02A6\02C1\u0254, but I see the actual characters (open o, esh,
ts digraph, modified letter reversed glottal stop, etc.

I'm sure this is straightforward but I can't get it to work.

All help appreciated!