How to work with encodings in Python?

Question

Python

Task: load json from a file, process the data and save it to another file in json format.
Script and data encoding utf8.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
How to stop writing this?
print s.encode("utf8")
How to get rid of these errors:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

They are completely irrelevant, but I don’t encode or decode anything: all data is in the same utf8 encoding.

Answer 1

Switch to Python 3