title: Cannot convert ascii to utf-8 in python
body: <p>I have polish word "wąż" which means "snake"</p>
  
  <p>but I get it from webservice in ascii, so :</p>
  
  <pre><code>snake_in_polish_in_ascii="w\xc4\x85\xc5\xbc"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>There are results of my trying:</p>
  
  <pre><code>print str(snake_in_polish_in_ascii) #this prints me w─ů┼╝
  
  snake_in_polish_in_ascii.decode('utf-8')
  print str(snake_in_polish_in_ascii) #this prints me w─ů┼╝ too
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>print  str(snake_in_polish_in_ascii.encode('utf-8'))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>raises exception:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc4 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm using Wing Ide, at Windows Xp with polish culture.</p>
  
  <p>At top of file I have:</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can't find a way to resolve it. Why I can't get "wąż" in output?</p>