Have you verified each individual byte has the correct value? I think LH317 is right, it's just the way that Python is displaying ... the data is sent in utf-8 encoding, and after messing around ...

You can use the str.encode method, which returns a bytestring (aka a Python 2 string), containing six bytes: s.encode('utf-8') Somewhat confusingly (to me, at least), you "encode" from Unicode to ...