title: Converting UTF-16 to UTF-8
body: <p>I've loading a string from a file. When I print out the string with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>print my_string
  print binascii.hexlify(my_string)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>2DF5
  0032004400460035
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Meaning this string is <code>UTF-16</code>. I would like to convert this string to <code>UTF-8</code> so that the above code produces this output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>2DF5
  32444635
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>my_string.decode('utf-8')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>32004400460035
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>Here's a quick sample:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    hello = 'hello'.encode('utf-16')
      print hello
      print binascii.hexlify(hello)
  
      hello = hello[2:].decode('utf-8')
      print hello
      print binascii.hexlify(hello)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which produces this output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>��hello
  fffe680065006c006c006f00
  hello
  680065006c006c006f00
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Expected output would be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>��hello
  fffe680065006c006c006f00
  hello
  68656c6c6f
  </code></pre>