title: Convert UTF-8 bytes to some other encoding in Python
body: <p>I need to do in Python 2.4 (yes, 2.4 :-( ).</p>
  
  <p>I've got a plain string object, which represents some text encoded with UTF-8. It comes from an external library, which can't be modified.</p>
  
  <p>So, what I think I need to do, is to create an Unicode object using bytes from that source object, and then convert it to some other encoding (iso-8859-2, actually).</p>
  
  <p>The plain string object is 'x'. "unicode()" seems to not work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; x
  'Sk\xc5\x82odowski'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; str(unicode(x, encoding='iso-8859-2'))
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in ?
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 2-3: ordinal not in range(128)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; unicode(x, encoding='iso-8859-2')
  u'Sk\u0139\x82odowski'
  </code></pre>