Python UnicodeDecode

If you get an error like this

>> bytestring = '\xc3\xa4'     # Uuh, some non-ASCII bytestring!
>>> german_ae += bytestring
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0:
  ordinal not in range(128)

then you must do

german_ae.decode('latin1').
here is the discussion
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/excerpt/pythonckbk_chap1/index.html