Setting Default Encoding to Unicode in Python

reset-sys-unicode.py

# reset-sys-unicode.py
#
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21129020/how-to-fix-unicodedecodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-decode-byte
#
# to encode a text with utf8 in python2

import sys

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

text = file('data/xxx.txt').read()
type(text) # -> 'str'

utxt = unicode(text)
type(utxt) #-> 'unicode'