toddysm

# reset the default encoding from ASCII to Unicode
# Note: it may not always work (depends on installations)
# see: http://blog.ianbicking.org/illusive-setdefaultencoding.html
import sys
reload(sys) # else the method will be missing
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

# convert from <type 'str'> to <type 'unicode'>
text.decode('utf-8')

toddysm

class TwitterHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler,
                     tornado.auth.TwitterMixin):
    """Handling Twitter authentication at URL http://www.yoursite.com/twitter"""
    @tornado.web.asynchronous
    def get(self):
        if self.get_argument("oauth_token", None):
            user = self.get_authenticated_user(self.async_callback(self._on_auth))
            return
        self.authenticate_redirect()