title: How to decode a unicode string Python
body: <p>What is the best way to decode an encoded string that looks like: <code>u'u\xf1somestring'</code> ?</p>
  
  <p>Background: I have a list that contains random values (strings and integers), I'm trying to convert every item in the list to a string then process each of them.</p>
  
  <p>Turns out some of the items are of the format:  <code>u'u\xf1somestring'</code>
  When I tried converting to a string, I get the error: <code>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf1' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)</code></p>
  
  <p>I have tried </p>
  
  <pre><code>item = u'u\xf1somestring'
  decoded_value = item.decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I keep getting the same error.</p>
  
  <p>I have read up about unicode characters and tried a number of suggestions from SO but none have worked so far. Am I missing something here? </p>