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Is there an easy way to make unicode work in python?

I'm trying to deal with unicode in python 2.7.2. I know there is the .encode('utf-8') thing but 1/2 the time when I add it, I get errors, and 1/2 the time when I don't add it I get errors.
Is there any way to tell python - what I thought was an up-to-date & modern language to just use unicode for strings and not make me have to fart around with .encode('utf-8') stuff?
I know... python 3.0 is supposed to do this, but I can't use 3.0 and 2.7 isn't all that old anyways...
For example:
url = "http://en.wikipedia.org//w/api.php?action=query&list=search&format=json&srlimit=" + str(items) + "&srsearch=" + urllib2.quote(title.encode('utf-8'))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 19: ordinal not in range(128)
Update
If I remove all my .encode statements from all my code and add # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- to the top of my file, right under the #!/usr/bin/python then I get the following, same as if I didn't add the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at all.
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py:1250: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "classes.py", line 583, in <module>
wiki.getPage(title)
File "classes.py", line 146, in getPage
url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&format=json&rvprop=content&rvlimit=1&titles=" + urllib2.quote(title)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 1250, in quote
return ''.join(map(quoter, s))
KeyError: u'\xf1'
I'm not manually typing in any string, I parsing HTML and json from websites. So the scripts/bytestreams/whatever they are, are all created by python.
Update 2 I can move the error along, but it just keeps coming up in new places. I was hoping python would be a useful scripting tool, but looks like after 3 days of no luck I'll just try a different language. Its a shame, python is preinstalled on osx. I've marked correct the answer that fixed the one instance of the error I posted.

This is a very old question but just wanted to add one partial suggestion. While I sympathise with the OP's pain - having gone through it a lot myself - here's one (partial) answer to make things "easier". Put this at the top of any Python 2.7 script:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
This will at least ensure that your own literal strings default to unicode rather than str.

There is no way to make unicode "just work" apart from using unicode strings everywhere and immediately decoding any encoded string you receive. The problem is that you MUST ALWAYS keep straight whether you're dealing with encoded or unencoded data, or use tools that keep track of it for you, or you're going to have a bad time.
Python 2 does some things that are problematic for this: it makes str the "default" rather than unicode for things like string literals, it silently coerces str to unicode when you add the two, and it lets you call .encode() on an already-encoded string to double-encode it. As a result, there are a lot of python coders and python libraries out there that have no idea what encodings they're designed to work with, but are nonetheless designed to deal with some particular encoding since the str type is designed to let the programmer manage the encoding themselves. And you have to think about the encoding each time you use these libraries since they don't support the unicode type themselves.
In your particular case, the first error tells you you're dealing with encoded UTF-8 data and trying to double-encode it, while the 2nd tells you you're dealing with UNencoded data. It looks like you may have both. You should really find and fix the source of the problem (I suspect it has to do with the silent coercion I mentioned above), but here's a hack that should fix it in the short term:
encoded_title = title
if isinstance(encoded_title, unicode):
encoded_title = title.encode('utf-8')
If this is in fact a case of silent coercion biting you, you should be able to easily track down the problem using the excellent unicode-nazi tool:
python -Werror -municodenazi myprog.py
This will give you a traceback right at the point unicode leaks into your non-unicode strings, instead of trying troubleshooting this exception way down the road from the actual problem. See my answer on this related question for details.

Yes, define your unicode data as unicode literals:
>>> u'Hi, this is unicode: üæ'
u'Hi, this is unicode: üæ'
You usually want to use '\uxxxx` unicode escapes or set a source code encoding. The following line at the top of your module, for example, sets the encoding to UTF-8:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
Read the Python Unicode HOWTO for the details, such as default encodings and such (the default source code encoding, for example, is ASCII).
As for your specific example, your title is not a Unicode literal but a python byte string, and python is trying to decode it to unicode for you just so you can encode it again. This fails, as the default codec for such automatic encodings is ASCII:
>>> 'å'.encode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Encoding only applies to actual unicode strings, so a byte string needs to be explicitly decoded:
>>> 'å'.decode('utf-8').encode('utf-8')
'\xc3\xa5'
If you are used to Python 3, then unicode literals in Python 2 (u'') are the new default string type in Python 3, while regular (byte) strings in Python 2 ('') are the same as bytes objects in Python 3 (b'').
If you have errors both with and without the encode call on title, you have mixed data. Test the title and encode as needed:
if isinstance(title, unicode):
title = title.encode('utf-8')
You may want to find out what produces the mixed unicode / byte string titles though, and correct that source to always produce one or the other.

be sure that title in your title.encode("utf-8") is type of unicode and dont use str("İŞşĞğÖöÜü")
use unicode("ĞğıIİiÖöŞşcçÇ") in your stringifiers

Actually, the easiest way to make Python work with unicode is to use Python 3, where everything is unicode by default.
Unfortunately, there are not many libraries written for P3, as well as some basic differences in coding & keyword use. That's the problem I have: the libraries I need are only available for P 2.7, and I don't know enough to convert them to P 3. :(

Python & fql: getting "Dami\u00e1n" instead of "Damián"

I created a file containing a dictionary with data written in Spanish (i.e. Damián, etc.):
fileNameX.write(json.dumps(dictionaryX, indent=4))
The data come from some fql fetching operations, i.e.:
select name from user where uid in XXX
When I open the file, I find that, for instance, "Damián" looks like "Dami\u00e1n".
I've tried some options:
ensure_ascii=False:
fileNameX.write(json.dumps(dictionaryX, indent=4, ensure_ascii=False))
But I get an error (UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can´t encode character u'\xe1' in position XXX: ordinal not in range(128)).
encode(encoding='latin-1):
dictionaryX.append({
'name': unicodeVar.encode(encoding='latin-1'),
...
})
But I get another error (UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position XXX: invalid continuation byte)
To sum up, I've tried several possibilities, but have less than a clue. I'm lost. Please, I need help. Thanks!

You have many options, and have stumbled upon something rather complicated that depends on your Python version and which you absolutely must understand fully in order to write correct code. Generally the approach taken in 3.x is stricter and a bit harder to work with, but it is much less likely that you will make a mistake or get yourself into a complicated situation. (Based on the exact symptoms you report, you seem to be using 2.x.)
json.dumps has different behaviour in 2.x and 3.x. In 2.x, it produces a str, which is a byte-string (unknown encoding). In 3.x, it still produces a str, but now str in 3.x is a proper Unicode string.
JSON is inherently a Unicode-supporting format, but it expects files to be in UTF-8 encoding. However, please understand that JSON supports \u style escapes in strings. When you read in this data, you will get the correct encoded string back. The reading code produces unicode objects (no matter whether you use 2.x or 3.x) when it reads strings out of the JSON.
When I open the file, I find that, for instance, "Damián" looks like "Dami\u00e1n"
á cannot be represented in ASCII. It gets encoded as \u00e1 by default, to avoid the other problems you had. This happens even in 3.x.
ensure_ascii=False
This disables the previous encoding. In 2.x, it means you get a unicode object instead - a real Unicode object, preserving the original á character. In 3.x, it means that the character is not explicitly translated. But either way, ensure_ascii=False means that json.dumps will give you a Unicode string.
Unicode strings must be encoded to be written to a file. There is no such thing as "unicode data"; Unicode is an abstraction. In 2.x, this encoding is implicitly 'ascii' when you feed a Unicode object to file.write; it was expecting a str. To get around this, you can use the codecs module, or explicitly encode as 'utf-8' before writing. In 3.x, the encoding is set with the encoding keyword argument when you open the file (the default is again probably not what you want).
encode(encoding='latin-1')
Here, you are encoding before producing the dictionary, so that you have a str object in your data. Now a problem occurs because when there are str objects in your data, the JSON encoder assumes, by default, that they represent Unicode strings in UTF-8 encoding. This can be changed, in 2.x, using the encoding keyword argument to json.dumps. (In 3.x, the encoder will simply refuse to serialize bytes objects, i.e. non-Unicode strings!)
However, if your goal is simply to get the data into the file directly, then json.dumps is the wrong tool for you. Have you wondered what that s in the name is for? It stands for "string"; this is the special case. The ordinary case, in fact, is writing directly to a file! (Instead of giving you a string and expecting you to write it yourself.) Which is what json.dump (no 's') does. Again, the JSON standard expects UTF-8 encoding, and again 2.x has an encoding keyword parameter that defaults to UTF-8 (you should leave this alone).

Use codecs.open() to open fileNameX with a specific encoding like encoding='utf-8' for example instead of using open().
Also, json.dump().

Since the string has a \u inside it that means it's a Unicode string. The string is actually correct! Your problem lies in displaying the string. If you print the string, Python's output encoding should print it in the proper encoding for your environment.
For example, this is what I get inside IDLE on Windows:
>>> print u'Dami\u00e1n'
Damián

django + unicode constant errors

I built a django site last year that utilises both a dashboard and an API for a client.
They are, on occasion, putting unicode information (usually via a Microsoft keyboard and a single quote character!) into the database.
It's fine to change this one instance for everything, but what I constantly get is something like this error when a new character is added that I haven't "converted":
UnicodeDecodeError at /xx/xxxxx/api/xxx.json
'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
The issue is actually that I need to be able to convert this unicode (from the model) into HTML.
# if a char breaks the system, replace it here (duplicate line)
text = unicode(str(text).replace('\xa3', '£'))
I duplicate this line here, but it just breaks otherwise.
Tearing my hair out because I know this is straight forward and I'm doing something remarkably silly somewhere.
Have searched elsewhere and realised that while my issue is not new, I can't find the answer elsewhere.

I assume that text is unicode (which seems a safe assumption, as \xa3 is the unicode for the £ character).
I'm not sure why you need to encode it at all, seeing as the text will be converted to utf-8 on output in the template, and all browsers are perfectly capable of displaying that. There is likely another point further down the line where something (probably your code, unfortunately) is assuming ASCII, and the implicit conversion is breaking things.
In that case, you could just do this:
text = text.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
which converts the non-ASCII characters into HTML/XML entities like £.

Tell the JSON-decoder that it shall decode the json-file as unicode. When using the json module directly, this can be done using this code:
json.JSONDecoder(encoding='utf8').decode(
json.JSONEncoder(encoding='utf8').encode('blä'))
If the JSON decoding takes place via some other modules (django, ...) maybe you can pass the information through this other module into the json stuff.

Python string encoding issue

I am using the Amazon MWS API to get the sales report for my store and then save that report in a table in the database. Unfortunately I am getting an encoding error when I try to encode the information as Unicode. After looking through the report (exactly as amazon sent it) I saw this string which is the location of the buyer:
'S�o Paulo'
so I tried to encode it like so:
encodeme = 'S�o Paulo'
encodeme.encode('utf-8)
but got the following error
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
The whole reason why I am trying to encode it is because as soon as Django sees the � character it throws a warning and cuts off the string, meaning that the location is saved as S instead of
São Paulo
Any help is appreciated.

It looks like you are having some kind of encoding problem.
First, you should be very certain what encoding Amazon is using in the report body they send you. Is it UTF-8? Is it ISO 8859-1? Something else?
Unfortunately the Amazon MWS Reports API documentation, especially their API Reference, is not very forthcoming about what encoding they use. They only encoding I see them mention is UTF-8, so that should be your first guess. The GetReport API documentation (p.36-37) describes the response element Report as being type xs:string, but I don't see where they define that data type. Maybe they mean XML Schema's string datatype.
So, I suggest you save the byte sequence you are receiving as your report body from Amazon in a file, with zero transformations. Be aware that your code which calls AWS might be modifying the report body string inadvertently. Examine the non-ASCII bytes in that file with a binary editor. Is the "São" of "São" stored as S\xC3\xA3o, indicating UTF-8 encoding? Or is it stored as S\xE3o, indicating ISO 8859-1 encoding?
I'm guessing that you receive your report as a flat file. The Amazon AWS documentation says that you can request reports be delivered to you as XML. This would have the advantage of giving you a reply with an explicit encoding declaration.
Once you know the encoding of the report body, you now need to handle it properly. You imply that you are using the Django framework and Python language code to receive the report from Amazon AWS.
One thing to get very clear (as Skirmantas also explains):
Unicode strings hold characters. Byte strings hold bytes (octets).
Encoding converts a Unicode string into a byte string.
Decoding converts a byte string into a Unicode string.
The string you get from Amazon AWS is a byte string. You need to decode it to get a Unicode string. But your code fragment, encodeme = 'São Paulo', gives you a byte string. encodeme.encode('utf-8) performs an encode() on the byte string, which isn't what you want. (The missing closing quote on 'utf-8 doesn't help.)
Try this example code:
>>> reportbody = 'S\xc3\xa3o Paulo' # UTF-8 encoded byte string
>>> reportbody.decode('utf-8') # returns a Unicode string, u'...'
u'S\xe3o Paulo'
You might find some background reading helpful. I agree with Hoxieboy that you should take the time to read Python's Unicode HOWTO. Also check out the top answers to What do I need to know about Unicode?.

I think you have to decode it using a correct encoding rather than encode it to utf-8. Try
s = s.decode('utf-8')
However you need to know which encoding to use. Input can come in other encodings that utf-8.
The error which you received UnicodeDecodeError means that your object is not unicode, it is a bytestring. When you do bytestring.encode, the string firstly is decoded into unicode object with default encoding (ascii) and only then it is encoded with utf-8.
I'll try to explain the difference of unicode string and utf-8 bytestring in python.
unicode is a python's datatype which represents a unicode string. You use unicode for most of string operations in your program. Python probably uses utf-8 in its internals though it could also be utf-16 and this doesn't matter for you.
bytestring is a binary safe string. It can be of any encoding. When you receive data, for example you open a file, you get a bytestring and in most cases you will want to decode it to unicode. When you write to file you have to encode unicode objects into bytestrings. Sometimes decoding/encoding is done for you by a framework or library. Not always however framework can do this because not always framework can known which encoding to use.
utf-8 is an encoding which can correctly represent any unicode string as a bytestring. However you can't decode any kind of bytestring with utf-8 into unicode. You need to know what encoding is used in the bytestring to decode it.

Official Python unicode documentation
You might try that webpage if you haven't already and see if you can get the answer you're looking for ;)

Python Encoding issue

Why am I getting this issue? and how do I resolve it?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 24: unexpected code byte
Thank you

Somewhere, perhaps subtly, you are asking Python to turn a stream of bytes into a "string" of characters.
Don't think of a string as "bytes". A string is a list of numbers, each number having an agreed meaning in Unicode. (#65 = Latin Capital A. #19968 = Chinese Character "One"/"First") .
There are many methods of encoding a list of Unicode entities into a stream of bytes. Python is assuming your stream of bytes is the result of a particular such method, called "UTF-8".
However, your stream of bytes has data that does not correspond to that method. Thus the error is raised.
You need to figure out the encoding of the stream of bytes, and tell Python that encoding.
It's important to know if you're using Python 2 or 3, and the code leading up to this exception to see where your bytes came from and what the appropriate way to deal with them is.
If it's from reading a file, you can explicity deal with the bytes read. But you must be sure of the file encoding.
If it's from a string that is part of your source code, then Python is assuming the "wrong thing" about your source files... perhaps $LC_ALL or $LANG needs to be set. This is a good time to firmly understand the concept of encoding, and how text editors choose an encoding to write, and what is standard for your language and operating system.

In addition to what Joe said, chardet is a useful tool to detect encoding of the source data.

Somewhere you have a plain string encoded as "Windows-1252" (or "cp1252") containing a "RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK" (’) instead of an APOSTROPHE ('). This could come from a file you read, or even in a Python source file of yours; you could be running Python 2.x and have a # -*- coding: utf8 -*- line somewhere near the script's beginning, or you could be running Python 3.x.
You don't give enough data; however, somewhere you have a cp1252-encoded string, which you try (explicitly or implicitly) to decode to unicode as utf-8. This won't work.
Give us more info, and we'll try again to help you.
Joe Koberg's answer reminded me of an older answer of mine, which some people have found helpful: Python UnicodeDecodeError - Am I misunderstanding encode?