title: How to convert a string to utf-8 in Python
body: <p>I have a browser which sends utf-8 characters to my Python server, but when I retrieve it from the query string, the encoding that Python returns is ASCII. How can I convert the plain string to utf-8?</p>
  
  <p>NOTE: The string passed from the web is already UTF-8 encoded, I just want to make Python to treat it as UTF-8 not ASCII.</p>