Python: encoding issues - comparing two strings with different encoding

Question

I have some problems with encoding using Python. I've searched for an answer for couple of hours now and still no luck.

I am currently working on Jupyter notebook with Python dataframes (pandas). Long story short - In a dataframe column I have different strings - single letters from the alphabet. I wanted to apply a function on this column, that will convert letters to numbers based on a specific key. But I got an error every time I tried this. When I dug for a reason behind this I realised that:

I have two strings 'T'. But they are not equal.

string1.encode() = b'T'  
string2.encode() = b'\xd0\xa2'

How can I standardize/encode/decode/modify all strings to have the same coding/basis so I can compare them and make operations on them? What is the easiest way to achieve that?