title: Unicode latin1 string encode / decode
body: <p>While fetching data from an unknown/old/non-consistent Mysql database to a Postgres utf-8 db using Python (Django) ORM I have sometimes faulty encoded data as a result.</p>
  
  <p>Target: <strong>grégory</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; a
  u'gr\xe3\xa9gory'
  
  &gt; print a
  grã©gory
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried several decode/encode tricks without success:</p>
  
  <pre><code> &gt; print a.encode('utf-8').decode('latin1')
   grÃ£Â©gory
  
   &gt; print a.encode('utf-8').decode('latin1')
   grÃ£Â©gory
  
   &gt; print a.decode('latin-1')
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 2-3: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Even with some
  unicode_escape</p>