title: Unicode in Python on Google App Engine
body: <p>I need to make a POST request in which the data might be non-ascii (chinese, japanese characters).
  I need to convert the input to unicode and encode with utf-8. Here's how I did it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>foo = unicode(self.request.get('foo'), 'utf-8') #convert to unicode
  foo = foo.encode('utf-8')                       #encode with utf-8
  data = {'foo': foo}
  payload = urllib.urlencode(data)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I keep getting this error in my logs: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>TypeError: decoding Unicode is not
    supported</p>
  </blockquote>