title: Trouble decoding utf-16 string
body: <p>I'm using <code>python3.3</code>. I've been trying to decode a certain string that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>b'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\xed:\xf9w\xdaH\xd2?\xcf\xbc....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>keeps going on. However whenever I try to decode this string using <code>str.decode('utf-16')</code> I get an error saying:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>'utf16' codec can't decode bytes in position 54-55: illegal UTF-16 surrogate
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not exactly sure how to decode this string.</p>