title: Google App Engine: Non-western characters in datastore, how to print to browser
body: <p>This is a follow up question to this: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12829113/google-analytics-character-encoding-of-utm-cookies">Google Analytics Character encoding of __utm cookies</a></p>
  
  <p>I have the following string stored in a datastore <code>db.TextProperty</code> - <code>Test%D0%AFTest</code>.  This was read from a utf-8 encoded cookie value.</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to simply print this string to the browser as <code>TestЯTest</code> (Notice the backwards R) but instead all I can get to display is: <code>TestÐ¯Test</code></p>
  
  <p>I've tried all kinds of unicode, encode('utf-8') decode('utf-8') solutions but nothing seems to work.  I either get a <code>UnicodeDecode Error</code> or the above text.  </p>
  
  <p>My HTTP headers contain the line: <code>Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  and the HTML itself contains the meta tag: http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"</code></p>
  
  <p>Nothing seems to work.</p>