how to encode string with unicode characters python

I have a sql statement: select 'ó' from dual; after running fetchall for this statement I get the following string.'\xc2\xbf' in python.

How do I get the original text based on the string returned? any ideas?

thanks!

Update: It turns out that the fetchall might be converting the '开发者_开发技巧ó' to an inverted questionmark(the \xc2\xbf). any ideas why that is. I'm using

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
??

http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.decode is what you're looking for.