Yes - and this is the problem, as à should be \u00c3.

I have the same problem trying to use UTF-8 account names in bitcoind. The problem is the same from console, bitcoin-qt debug and json-rpc. I do not clearly understand how this should work, but i assume, that if i pass something to bitcoind with jsonrpc as utf-8 string - it can store it in any way, but should return utf-8 string. But in all cases it return double encoded string.



In [17]: a = 'Ã'

In [18]: json.dumps(a)
Out[18]: '"\\u00c3"'

that how char  'Ã' should escape.


but bitcoind returns

In [19]: b = "\u00C3\u0083"

In [20]: b.encode('latin-1').decode()
Out[20]: 'Ã'

and i should decode it to use.