So, my cloud of stupidity just lifted, and I think I've seen the light. I just realized my string never actually got turned into unicode along the way--I'm actually dealing with an ascii string and a utf-8 string. When I encode the ascii into utf-8 with asciistring.encode("utf-8"), I can concatenate them together. Thanks for the help--your answer got my mind turning a different direction. - Chris
You are mixing: 1. A unicode string 2. A plain 8-bit string with characters outside the ascii range.
Its not clear from the code fragment which strings are the unicode ones, and which are not. I suggest you work all in unicode.... You need to convert those 8 bit strings into unicode strings by applying a character encoding using code like...
myunicodestring = unicode(my8bitstring,'utf-8')
....substitute 'utf-8' for whatever character encoding you are using.