str encoding from latin-1 to utf-8 arbitrarily
<p>I have some code that grabs strings from one environment and reproduces them in another.  I am using Python 3.5.  I keep running into this kind of error:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2013' in
  position 112: Body ('–') is not valid Latin-1. Use
  body.encode('utf-8') if you want to send it encoded in UTF-8.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>...and I want to avoid it.  This error is coming from the requests module.  The problem is that I am dealing with literally tens of thousands of strings and new ones are added all the time.  People are cutting and pasting from Excel and whatnot - and have no idea what characters I will bump into so I can't just run a <code>str.replace()</code>.  I would like to make sure that every string I get from environment 1 is properly utf-8 encoded before I send it to environment 2.  </p>

<p>I tried <code>str('yadayada').encode('utf-8).decode('utf-8)</code> and that didn't work.  I tried <code>str('yadaya', 'utf-8')</code> and that didn't work.  I tried declaring <code>"# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-"</code> and that didn't work.</p>