title: How to get unicode month name in Python?
body: <p>I am trying to get a unicode version of <code>calendar.month_abbr[6]</code>. If I don't specify an encoding for the locale, I don't know how to convert the string to unicode. The example code below shows my problem:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import locale
  &gt;&gt;&gt; import calendar
  &gt;&gt;&gt; locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU"))
  'ru_RU'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6])
  '\xb8\xee\xdd'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8"))
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
    File "/usr/lib/python2.5/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
      return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb8 in position 0: unexpected code byte
  &gt;&gt;&gt; locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ("ru_RU", "utf8"))
  'ru_RU.UTF8'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6])
  '\xd0\x98\xd1\x8e\xd0\xbd'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print repr(calendar.month_abbr[6].decode("utf8"))
  u'\u0418\u044e\u043d'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any ideas how to solve this? The solution doesn't have to look like this. Any solution that gives me the abbreviated month name in unicode is fine.</p>