string to unicode

[Artie Ziff]

if I am using the standard csv library to read contents of a csv file 
which contains Unicode strings (short example: 
'\xe8\x9f\x92\xe8\x9b\x87'), how do I use a python Unicode method such 
as decode or encode to transform this string type into a python unicode 
type? Must I know the encoding (byte groupings) of the Unicode? Can I 
get this from the file? Perhaps I need to open the file with particular 
attributes?

thanks!