title: Encoding Characters not working on a list?
body: <p>I have a list like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>print alist    
  ['G\xc3\xbcnther', 'Santher']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And want to change it to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['Günther', 'Santher']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried a lot of stuff like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>alist=[s.encode("utf-8") for s in alist]
  print alist
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In others the word Günther gets lost, or G\xc3\xbcnther stays the same. What am i doing wrong?</p>