ascii codec can't encode character

Question

I'm trying to create a string with special characters from portuguese-brazil (eg á, à, â, ç)

push_message = 'á'
push_message.decode().encode('utf-8')

But I'm getting this error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I need to send this to Parse Api, and Parse Api just allows utf8 encoding. What can I do to solve this?

EDIT

When I try

push_message.decode('utf-8')

I get

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

When I try

push_message.decode('latin-1')

I get

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

它像这样工作：

unicode(push_message.decode('utf-8'))