contro opinion wrote: > how can i get "你好" from '\xc4\xe3\xba\xc3' ? >>> print '\xc4\xe3\xba\xc3'.decode("gbk") 你好 General rule: use the decode() method to convert from bytestring to unicode and encode() to convert from unicode to bytestring. bytestring.encode(x) will implicitly try bytestring.decode("ascii").encode(x) which is likely to fail.