title: Python to show special characters
body: <p>I know there are tons of threads regarding this issue but I have not managed to find one which solves my problem.</p>
  
  <p>I am trying to print a string but when printed it doesn't show special characters (e.g. æ, ø, å, ö and ü). When I print the string using <code>repr()</code> this is what I get:</p>
  
  <p><code>u'Von D\xc3\xbc'</code> and <code>u'\xc3\x96berg'</code></p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know how I can convert this to <code>Von Dü</code> and  <code>Öberg</code>? It's  important to me that these characters are not ignored, e.g. <code>myStr.encode("ascii", "ignore")</code>.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <p>This is the code I use. I use BeautifulSoup to scrape a website. The contents of a cell (<code>&lt;td&gt;</code>) in a table (<code>&lt;table&gt;</code>), is put into the variable <code>name</code>. This is the variable which contains special characters that I cannot print.</p>
  
  <pre><code>web = urllib2.urlopen(url);
  soup = BeautifulSoup(web)
  tables = soup.find_all("table")
  scene_tables = [2, 3, 6, 7, 10]
  scene_index = 0
  # Iterate over the &lt;table&gt;s we want to work with
  for scene_table in scene_tables:
      i = 0
      # Iterate over &lt; td&gt; to find time and name
      for td in tables[scene_table].find_all("td"):
          if i % 2 == 0:  # td contains the time
              time = remove_whitespace(td.get_text())
          else:           # td contains the name
              name = remove_whitespace(td.get_text()) # This is the variable containing "nonsense"
              print "%s: %s" % (time, name,)
          i += 1
      scene_index += 1
  </code></pre>