Handle wrongly encoded character in Python unicode string

Your unicode string is fine:

>>> unicodedata.name(u"\xfc")
'LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS'

The problem you see at the interactive prompt is that the interpreter doesn't know what encoding to use to output the string to your terminal, so it falls back to the "ascii" codec -- but that codec only knows how to deal with ASCII characters. It works fine on my machine (because sys.stdout.encoding is "UTF-8" for me -- likely because something like my environment variable settings differ from yours)

>>> print u'Gl\xfcck'
Glück

You have to convert your unicode string into a standard string using some encoding e.g. utf-8:

some_unicode_string.encode('utf-8')

Apart from that: this is a dupe of

BeautifulSoup findall with class attribute- unicode encode error

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