def fix_encoding(text):
    """ force utf-8 encoding """
    encodings = ('iso-8859-15','utf-8','ascii')
    success = False
    for encoding in encodings:
        try:
            utext = text.decode(encoding)
            success = True
            break
        except:
            success = False
    if success:
        return utext.encode('utf-8')
    return text

import unicodecsv as csv

out = open(filename, 'w')
writer = csv.writer(out, dialect='excel', encoding='utf-8')