Encode/Decode error using utf-8

Question

Ho would I properly encode the following:

# # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>>> 'What\x80\x99s Up: Balloon to the Rescue!'.encode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> 'What\x80\x99s Up: Balloon to the Rescue!'.decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
 return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 4: invalid start byte

Answer 1

You've got two issues here. First, your UTF-8 byte sequence is wrong; it should be \xe2\x80\x99. You are also using the wrong function; you need to decode it from UTF-8:

>>> print 'What\xe2\x80\x99s Up: Balloon to the Rescue!'.decode('utf-8')
What’s Up: Balloon to the Rescue!

• beerbajay: Did you just guess which character OP meant?
• spencercw: @beerbajay Yes. Given two of the bytes are the same and it makes perfect sense in the context, I think I'm probably right. ;)
• David542: @spencercw Yea, this seems to be a problem upstream. That was the value I had in the database, so I think prior to that I need to encode to utf.

Answer 2

>>> type('What\x80\x99s Up: Balloon to the Rescue!')
<type 'str'>

So you can't encode it since it is not Unicode.

What is your Unicode input?