title: Decoding bytes as unicode string
body: <p>The question is how to extract string, which represented as bytes (warning) in string? What I actually mean:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; s1 = '\\xd0\\xb1'  #  But this is NOT bytes of s1! s1 should be 'б'!
  '\\xd0\\xb1'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; s1[0]
  '\\'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; len(s1)            #  The problem is here: I thought I would see (2), but:
  8
  &gt;&gt;&gt; type(s1)
  &lt;class 'str'&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt; type(s1[0])
  &lt;class 'str'&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt; s1[0] == '\\'
  True
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So how can i convert <strong>s1</strong> to <strong>'б'</strong> (cyrillic symbol - the real representation of <strong>'\xd0\xb1'</strong>). I already asked here a similiar question, but my bad was misunderstood of real represented view of <strong>s1</strong> (i thought that <strong>'\'</strong> was <strong>'\'</strong>, not the <strong>'\\'</strong>).</p>