I don't know if you mean to this, but this works:

some_binary = a = b"\x94my quote\x94"
result = some_binary.decode()

And you got the result... If you don't know which encoding to choose, you can use chardet.detect:

import chardet
chardet.detect(some_binary)

To add to Lennart Regebro's answer There is even the third way that can be used:

encoded3 = str.encode(original, 'utf-8')
print(encoded3)

Anyway, it is actually exactly the same as the first approach. It may also look that the second way is a syntactic sugar for the third approach.

A programming language is a means to express abstract ideas formally, to be executed by the machine. A programming language is considered good if it contains constructs that one needs. Python is a hybrid language -- i.e. more natural and more versatile than pure OO or pure procedural languages. Sometimes functions are more appropriate than the object methods, sometimes the reverse is true. It depends on mental picture of the solved problem.

Anyway, the feature mentioned in the question is probably a by-product of the language implementation/design. In my opinion, this is a nice example that show the alternative thinking about technically the same thing.

In other words, calling an object method means thinking in terms "let the object gives me the wanted result". Calling a function as the alternative means "let the outer code processes the passed argument and extracts the wanted value".

The first approach emphasizes the ability of the object to do the task on its own, the second approach emphasizes the ability of an separate algoritm to extract the data. Sometimes, the separate code may be that much special that it is not wise to add it as a general method to the class of the object.

Guessing at all the things omitted from the original question, but, assuming Python 2.x the key is to read the error messages carefully: in particular where you call 'encode' but the message says 'decode' and vice versa, but also the types of the values included in the messages.

In the first example string is of type unicode and you attempted to decode it which is an operation converting a byte string to unicode. Python helpfully attempted to convert the unicode value to str using the default 'ascii' encoding but since your string contained a non-ascii character you got the error which says that Python was unable to encode a unicode value. Here's an example which shows the type of the input string:

>>> u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#7>", line 1, in <module>
    u"\xa0".decode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

In the second case you do the reverse attempting to encode a byte string. Encoding is an operation that converts unicode to a byte string so Python helpfully attempts to convert your byte string to unicode first and, since you didn't give it an ascii string the default ascii decoder fails:

>>> "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    "\xc2".encode("ascii", "ignore")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)