title: Unicode encoding for Polish characters in Python
body: <p>I am having a Polish artist name as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Żółte słonie
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In my dataset (json file), it has been encoded as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\u017b\u00f3\u0142te S\u0142onie
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am reading the json and doing some pre-processing and writing the output to a text file. I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u017b' in position 0: character maps to &lt;undefined&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I looked up the Unicode encoding for Polish characters online and the encoding looks fine to me. Since I have never worked with anything other than LATIN before, I wanted to confirm this with the SO community. If the encoding is right, then why is Python not handling it?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  TM</p>