str  -> decode(‘the_coding_of_str‘) -> unicode
unicode -> encode(‘the_coding_you_want‘) -> str

>>> u‘中文‘.encode(‘utf-8‘)
‘\xe4\xb8\xad\xe6\x96\x87‘
>>> len(u‘中文‘.encode(‘utf-8‘))
6　

>>> type(u‘中文‘)
<type ‘unicode‘>

>>> ‘中文‘.encode(‘utf-8‘)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii‘ codec can‘t decode byte 0xe4 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> u‘中文‘.decode(‘utf-8‘)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii‘ codec can‘t encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)