type(s)
<type 'str'>
>>> s
'\x04B\x045\x04A\x04B\x00\r\x00\n'

>>> print s.decode('utf-8')
B5AB

>>> s = unicode('тест', 'utf-8')
>>> s
u'\u0442\u0435\u0441\u0442'
>>> s.decode('utf-8', "ignore")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-3: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> 'тест'
'\xd1\x82\xd0\xb5\xd1\x81\xd1\x82'

>>> print('\x04B\x045\x04A\x04B\x00\r\x00\n')
B5AB

>>> print(u'asd')
asd

>>> print u'тест'.encode('unicode-escape')
\u0442\u0435\u0441\u0442
>>> print '\u0442\u0435\u0441\u0442'.decode('unicode-escape')
тест
>>>

>>> b'\x04B\x045\x04A\x04B\x00\r\x00\n'.decode('utf-16be')
'тест\r\n'
>>>