[ a ][ b ][ c ] = "abc"
[ 97 ][ 98 ][ 99 ] = "abc"

A windows-1252 encoded string looks like this:
[ 97 ] [ 98 ] [ 99 ] [ 150 ] = "abc–"

>>> x = "abc" + chr(150)
>>> print repr(x)
'abc\x96'
>>> u"Hello" + x
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ASCII' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

A UTF-8 encoded string looks like this:
[ 97 ] [ 98 ] [ 99 ] [ 226 ] [ 128 ] [ 147 ] = "abc–"
[0x61] [0x62] [0x63] [0xe2] [ 0x80] [ 0x93] = "abc-"

>>> x = "abc\xe2\x80\x93"
>>> print repr(x)
'abc\xe2\x80\x93'
>>> u"Hello" + x
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ASCII' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> x = "abc\xe2\x80\x93"
>>> x = x.decode("utf-8")
>>> print type(x)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> y = "abc" + chr(150)
>>> y = y.decode("windows-1252")
>>> print type(y)
>>> print x + y
abc–abc–

>>> u = u"abc\u2013"
>>> print u
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> print u.encode("utf-8")
abc–

>>> import codecs
>>> fh = codecs.open("/tmp/utf-8.txt", "w", "utf-8")
>>> fh.write(u"\u2013")
>>> fh.close()

>>> stream = urllib.urlopen("http://www.google.com")
>>> Reader = codecs.getreader("utf-8")
>>> fh = Reader(stream)
>>> type(fh.read(1))
<type 'unicode'>
>>> Reader
<class encodings.utf_8.StreamReader at 0xa6f890>

>>> fh = codecs.getreader("utf-8")(urllib.urlopen("http://www.google.com"))
>>> type(fh.read(1))

>>> x = "abc\xe2\x80\x93" # our "abc-" utf-8 string
>>> fh = codecs.open("/tmp/foo.txt", "w", "utf-8")
>>> fh.write(x)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/codecs.py", line 638, in write
 return self.writer.write(data)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/codecs.py", line 303, in write
 data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

[ 97 ] [ 98 ] [ 99 ] [ 226 ] [ 128 ] [ 147 ] = "abc–"

>>> my_utf8 = "abc–"
>>> print len(my_utf8)
6

>>> print repr(my_utf8)
'abc\xe2\x80\x93'

>>> my_utf8[-1] # Get the last char
'\x93'

>>> my_unicode = my_utf8.decode("utf-8")
>>> print repr(my_unicode)
u'abc\u2013'
>>> print len(my_unicode)
4
>>> print my_unicode[-1]
–

>>> u"" + u"\u2019".encode("utf-8")
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 0:  ordinal not in range(128)

>>> ",".join([u"This string\u2019s unicode", u"This string\u2019s utf-8".encode("utf-8")])
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> "%s\n%s" % (u"This string\u2019s unicode", u"This string\u2019s utf-8".encode("utf-8"),)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> buffer = []
>>> fh = open("utf-8-sample.txt")
>>> buffer.append(fh.read())
>>> fh.close()
>>> buffer.append(u"This string\u2019s unicode")
>>> print repr(buffer)
['This file\xe2\x80\x99s got utf-8 in it\n', u'This string\u2019s unicode']
>>> print "\n".join(buffer)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> import codecs
>>> buffer = []
>>> fh = open("utf-8-sample.txt", "r", "utf-8")
>>> buffer.append(fh.read())
>>> fh.close()
>>> print repr(buffer)
[u'This file\u2019s got utf-8 in it\n', u'This string\u2019s unicode']
>>> buffer.append(u"This string\u2019s unicode")
>>> print "\n".join(buffer)
This file's got utf-8 in it
 
This string's unicode

Our UTF-8 encoded string looks like this:
[ 97 ] [ 98 ] [ 99 ] [ 226 ] [ 128 ] [ 147 ] = "abc–"

11100010

11100010 10000000 10010011

 
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
XXXX0010 XX000000 XX010011 Remove the X's
0010    000000  010011 Collapse the numbers
00100000 00010011     Get Unicode number 0x2013, 8211 The "–"