title: Error on converting Latin-1 to UTF-8 String in Python 3
body: <p>I have a text dataset that can be imported by pandas only by using the encoding <strong>Latin-1</strong>, when I try to use another encodings, it results error. I would like to clear the special characters from that dataset. However, those special characters appears in the hex form like this:</p>
  <pre><code>AKU\n\nKU \xf0\x9f\x98\x84\xf0\x9f\x98\x84\xf0\x9f\x98\x84
  </code></pre>
  <p>Then I saw on another thread that I can get rid of this by decoding this to Latin-1, then encode to UTF-8. But it resulted error as shown in the image.</p>
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>x = data.iloc[5, 0].decode('iso-8859-1').encode('utf8')
  </code></pre>
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
  &lt;ipython-input-91-c80119246806&gt; in &lt;module&gt;()
        1 print(data.iloc[5, 0])
  ----&gt; 2 x = data.iloc[5, 0].decode('iso-8859-1').encode('utf8')
        3 if True:
        4   x = re.sub(&quot;[\n\t]&quot;, ' ', x)
        5   x = re.sub(&quot;\d+&quot;, ' ', x)
  
  AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'
  </code></pre>
  <p>Basically, how can I convert that to UTF-8 for the next steps for text processing? Or is there any other way to get rid of those without need of convertion? Thank you</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/yGPBY.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/yGPBY.png" alt="Error appears like this" /></a></p>