title: UnicodeDecodeError, invalid continuation byte
body: <p>Why is the below item failing? Why does it succeed with &quot;latin-1&quot; codec?</p>
  <pre><code>o = &quot;a test of \xe9 char&quot; #I want this to remain a string as this is what I am receiving
  v = o.decode(&quot;utf-8&quot;)
  </code></pre>
  <p>Which results in:</p>
  <pre><code> Traceback (most recent call last):  
   File &quot;&lt;stdin&gt;&quot;, line 1, in &lt;module&gt;  
   File &quot;C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py&quot;,
   line 16, in decode
       return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError:
   'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 10: invalid continuation byte
  </code></pre>