title: Substitute for u'string'
body: <p>I saved my script in UTF-8 encoding.</p>
  
  <p>I changed my codepage on windows to 65001.</p>
  
  <p>I'm on python 2.6</p>
  
  <p>Script #1</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  print u'Español'
  x = raw_input()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Script #2</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  a = 'Español'
  a.encode('utf8')
  print a
  x = raw_input()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Script #1, prints the word fine with no errors, Script #2 does error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec
    can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 4:
    ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I want to be able to print this variable without errors dynamically as in script #2.
  the encode('utf8') was mentioned to me as the equivalent of doing u'string'</p>
  
  <p>Obviously, it's not because it throws errors.
  How can I do it folks?</p>