title: Python string decoding issue
body: <p>I am trying to parse a CSV file containing some data, mostly numeral but with some strings - which I do not know their encoding, but I do know they are in Hebrew.</p>
  
  <p>Eventually I need to know the encoding so I can unicode the strings, print them, and perhaps throw them into a database later on.</p>
  
  <p>I tried using <a href="http://chardet.feedparser.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chardet</a>, which claims the strings are Windows-1255 (<code>cp1255</code>) but trying to do <code>print someString.decode('cp1255')</code> yields the notorious error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-4: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried every other encoding possible, to no avail. Also, the file is absolutely valid since I can open the CSV in Excel and I see the correct data.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how I can properly decode these strings?</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> here is an example. One of the strings looks like this (first five letters of the Hebrew alphabet):</p>
  
  <pre><code>print repr(sampleString)
  #prints:
  '\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(using Python 2.6.2)</p>