title: Can't decode a cyrillic string in python
body: <p>I have an encoded file with strings like </p>
  
  <pre><code>b'1'    b'\xca\xee\xef\xe5\xe9\xf1\xea' b'1'    b'ADMIN'    b'2013-07-08 00:21:55'  
  b'2'    b'\xd7\xe5\xeb\xff\xe1\xe8\xed\xf1\xea' b'1'    b'ADMIN'    b'2013-07-08 00:22:05'  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How should I decode it? I tried to use codecs, decode/encode cp1251, but it didn't work.</p>
  
  <p><code>file -bi</code> says charset=us-ascii</p>
  
  <p>There should be a string in cyrillic(cp1251) actually</p>
  
  <p>python 2.7</p>
  
  <p>The output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; w=r'\xd7\xe5\xe\xff\xe1\xe8\xed\xf1\xea'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; w='\xd7\xe5\xe\xff\xe1\xe8\xed\xf1\xea'
  ValueError: invalid \x escape
  &gt;&gt;&gt; w=r'\xd7\xe5\xe\xff\xe1\xe8\xed\xf1\xea'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; w.decode('raw_unicode_escape')
  u'\\xd7\\xe5\\xe\\xff\\xe1\\xe8\\xed\\xf1\\xea'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; w.decode('utf-8')
  u'\\xd7\\xe5\\xe\\xff\\xe1\\xe8\\xed\\xf1\\xea'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; unicode(w)
  u'\\xd7\\xe5\\xe\\xff\\xe1\\xe8\\xed\\xf1\\xea'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; unicode(w, 'utf-8')
  u'\\xd7\\xe5\\xe\\xff\\xe1\\xe8\\xed\\xf1\\xea'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I did everything: decode("utf-8"), used unicode and so, but nothing changes. Every time I get the same set of bytes.</p>