Converting to unicode

[ihatehippies]

Does anyone know how to convert an instance to unicode?
I understand how to convert a string into unicode format

u=unicode(s, 'ASCII', ignore), however this assumes that s is already a string and converting s by the str(s) method will kick back an error if s contains unicode unfriendly.
The strings I'm processing are 'instances' and the process works fine until the instance contains a character outside of the normal 128 character range. I found this link that I think is closely related. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0349/ Does anyone have any experience with this?

[ihatehippies]

the following is a function within a 'worddocument' class. It basically parses tables in word documents.

def GetTables(self):
        doc = self.app.Documents[0]
        tables = []
        result=[]
        for word_table in doc.Tables:
            rows = []
            for word_row in word_table.Rows:
                yield(word_row)#cannot convert to unicode

anyone know how to convert this to unicode. Its type is instance. Converting it to string will raise an error

[ihatehippies]

anyone know anything about encoding. The actual character that is throwing the error is a 1/2 symbol. Could I do

x='some string'
for each_letter in x:
        try:
               each_letter.encode(#what goes here?)
        except:
                try:
                     #some other encoding format??

[ihatehippies]

as much fun as it is writing to myself.. can someone explain how I use:
"To convert a class instance to Unicode, a __unicode__ method can be defined by a class, analogous to __str__. "

Its found on this link http://www.python.org/doc/2.2.3/whatsnew/node8.html