Why is UnicodeEncodeError during ** decoding **?

Question

Why is UnicodeEncodeError during decoding ?

I believe that a UnicodeDecodeError .

 >>> u'\udcc3'.decode('utf8') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/home/foo_x_d/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 character u'\udcc3' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)