Using Python codecs but still getting UnicodeDecodeError - python-2.7

Question

I have a non-English list of rows where each row is a list of strings and ints. I need to write this data to a file and convert all numbers to strings accordingly.
The data contents is the following:
[[u'12', u'as', u'ss', u'ge', u'ge', u'm\xfcnze', u'10.0', u'25.2', u'68.05', 1, 2, 0],
[u'13', u'aas', u'sss', u'tge', u'a', u'mat', u'11.0', u'35.7', u'10.1', 1, 1, 1], ...]
The loop breaks on the first list which contains u'm\xfcnze'.
import codecs
with codecs.open("temp.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
for row in data:
f.write(' '.join([str(r) for r in row]))
f.write('\n')
The code above fails with UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 38: ordinal not in range(128) error.
Trying r.encode('utf-8') if isinstance(r, str) does not solve this issue, so what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

This should work:
import codecs
with codecs.open("temp.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
for row in data:
f.write(' '.join([unicode(r) for r in row]))
f.write('\n')
I'm using the unicode() function
Note, because Python 3 string data type is string unicode, your code works fine in Python 3 without any modification (no str -> unicode needed)