python: how to convert a string to utf-8
<p>I have a browser which sends utf-8 characters to my python server, but when I retrieve it from the query string, the encoding that python returns is ascii I think, how can I convert the plain string to utf-8?</p>

<p>NOTE: the string passed from the web is already UTF-8 encoded, I just want to make python to treat it as UTF-8 not ascii(otherwise there are some errors pop up)</p>
