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In case of writing to python3

>>> a = u'bats\u00E0'
>>> print a
batsà
>>> f = open("/tmp/test", "w")
>>> f.write(a)
>>> f.close()
>>> data = open("/tmp/test").read()
>>> data
'batsà'

In case of writing to python2:

>>> a = u'bats\u00E0'
>>> f = open("/tmp/test", "w")
>>> f.write(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

To avoid this error you would have to encode it to bytes using codecs "utf-8" like this:

>>> f.write(a.encode("utf-8"))
>>> f.close()

and decode the data while reading using the codecs "utf-8":

>>> data = open("/tmp/test").read()
>>> data.decode("utf-8")
u'bats\xe0'

And also if you try to execute print on this string it will automatically decode using the "utf-8" codecs like this

>>> print a
batsà

In case of writing in python3

>>> a = u'bats\u00E0'
>>> print a
batsà
>>> f = open("/tmp/test", "w")
>>> f.write(a)
>>> f.close()
>>> data = open("/tmp/test").read()
>>> data
'batsà'

In case of writing in python2:

>>> a = u'bats\u00E0'
>>> f = open("/tmp/test", "w")
>>> f.write(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe0' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

To avoid this error you would have to encode it to bytes using codecs "utf-8" like this:

>>> f.write(a.encode("utf-8"))
>>> f.close()

and decode the data while reading using the codecs "utf-8":

>>> data = open("/tmp/test").read()
>>> data.decode("utf-8")
u'bats\xe0'

And also if you try to execute print on this string it will automatically decode using the "utf-8" codecs like this

>>> print a
batsà