Usage of unicode() and encode() functions in Python

str is text representation in bytes, unicode is text representation in characters.

You decode text from bytes to unicode and encode a unicode into bytes with some encoding.

That is:

>>> 'abc'.decode('utf-8')  # str to unicode
u'abc'
>>> u'abc'.encode('utf-8') # unicode to str
'abc'

UPD Sep 2020: The answer was written when Python 2 was mostly used. In Python 3, str was renamed to bytes, and unicode was renamed to str.

>>> b'abc'.decode('utf-8') # bytes to str
'abc'
>>> 'abc'.encode('utf-8'). # str to bytes
b'abc'

You are using encode("utf-8") incorrectly. Python byte strings (str type) have an encoding, Unicode does not. You can convert a Unicode string to a Python byte string using uni.encode(encoding), and you can convert a byte string to a Unicode string using s.decode(encoding) (or equivalently, unicode(s, encoding)).

If fullFilePath and path are currently a str type, you should figure out how they are encoded. For example, if the current encoding is utf-8, you would use:

path = path.decode('utf-8')
fullFilePath = fullFilePath.decode('utf-8')

If this doesn't fix it, the actual issue may be that you are not using a Unicode string in your execute() call, try changing it to the following:

cur.execute(u"update docs set path = :fullFilePath where path = :path", locals())

Make sure you've set your locale settings right before running the script from the shell, e.g.

$ locale -a | grep "^en_.\+UTF-8"
en_GB.UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8
$ export LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

Docs: man locale, man setlocale.