title: Junk characters (smart quotes, etc.) in output file
body: <p>I am reading a bunch of strings from mysql database using python, and after some processing, writing them to a CSV file. However I see some totally junk characters appearing in the csv file. For example when I open the csv using gvim, I see characters like <code>&lt;92&gt;</code>,<code>&lt;89&gt;</code>, <code>&lt;94&gt;</code> etc. </p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts? I tried doing string.encode('utf-8') before writing to csv but that gave an error that <code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x93 in position 905: ordinal not in range(128)</code></p>