title: Generate list from string with proper encoding (UTF-8)
body: <p>I'm having a hard time trying to generate a list from a string, with a proper UTF-8 encoding, I'm using Python (I'm just learning to program, so bare with my silly question/terrible coding).</p>
  
  <p>The source file is a tweet feed (JSON format), after parsing it successfully and extracting the tweet message from all the rest I manage to get the text with the right encoding only after a print (as a string). If I try to put it pack into list forms, it goes back to unencoded <code>u\000000</code> form.</p>
  
  <p>My code is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import json
  
  with open("file_name.txt") as tweets_file:
      tweets_list = [] 
      for a in tweets_file:
          b = json.loads(a)
          tweets_list.append(b)
  
      tweet = []
      for i in tweets_list:
          key = "text"
          if key in i:
              t = i["text"]
              tweet.append(t)
  
      for k in tweet:
          print k.encode("utf-8")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As an alternative, I tried to have the encoding at the beginning (when fetching the file):</p>
  
  <pre><code>import json
  import codecs
  
  tweets_file = codecs.open("file_name.txt", "r", "utf-8")
  tweets_list = [] 
  for a in tweets_file:
      b = json.loads(a)
      tweets_list.append(b)
  tweets_file.close()
  
  tweet = []
  for i in tweets_list:
      key = "text"
      if key in i:
          t = i["text"]
          tweet.append(t)
  
  for k in tweet:
      print k
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>My question is</strong>: how can I put the resulting k strings, into a list? With each k string as an item?</p>