Error encoding/decoding already Unicode object python - python-2.7

Question

Im using Python2.7
I have an unicode string like this:
s = u'Rub\xc3\xa9n'
I would like printing this:
print convert(s)
Rubén
I tried directly printing in several ways, but with not success:
print y
Rubén
print y.enconde('utf-8')
Rubén
print y.decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 3-4: ordinal not in range(128)
I know the form in which I declared the string is not the best, but other scripts are giving that format.
Thank you very much for help.

Answer 1

That is a Unicode string that was mis-decoded as latin1 or a similar encoding such as windows-1252, but was really utf8:
>>> s = 'Rub\xc3\xa9n'.decode('latin1')
>>> s
u'Rub\xc3\xa9n'
It should have been decoded as:
>>> s = 'Rub\xc3\xa9n'.decode('utf8')
>>> s
u'Rub\xe9n'
>>> print s
Rubén
If you don't have control of how the string was generated, you can undo the problem with:
>>> print u'Rub\xc3\xa9n'.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
Rubén