This topic is already on StackOverflow but I didn't find any satisfying solution:

I have some strings in Unicode coming from a server and I have some hardcoded strings in the code which I'd like to match against. And I do understand why I can't just make a `==` but I do not succeed in converting them properly (I don't care if I've to do str -> unicode or unicode -> str).

I tried `encode` and `decode` but it didn't gave any result.

Here is what I receive...

```
fromServer = {unicode} u'Führerschein nötig'
fromCode = {str} 'Führerschein nötig'

```

(as you can see, it is german!)

How can have them equals in Python **2** ?