Python string to unicode

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How do I treat an ASCII string as unicode and unescape the escaped characters in it in python?
How do convert unicode escape sequences to unicode characters in a python string

I have a string that contains unicode characters e.g. u2026 etc. Somehow it is not received to me as unicode, but is received as a str. How do I convert it back to unicode?

>>> a="Hellou2026"
>>> b=u"Hellou2026"
>>> print a
Hellou2026
>>> print b
Hello…
>>> print unicode(a)
Hellou2026
>>>

So clearly unicode(a) is not the answer. Then what is?

Asked By: prongs

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Answer 1

Unicode escapes only work in unicode strings, so this

 a="u2026"

is actually a string of 6 characters: ”, ‘u’, ‘2’, ‘0’, ‘2’, ‘6’.

To make unicode out of this, use decode('unicode-escape'):

a="u2026"
print repr(a)
print repr(a.decode('unicode-escape'))

## '\u2026'
## u'u2026'

Answered By: georg

Answer 2

Decode it with the unicode-escape codec:

>>> a="Hellou2026"
>>> a.decode('unicode-escape')
u'Hellou2026'
>>> print _
Hello…

This is because for a non-unicode string the u2026 is not recognised but is instead treated as a literal series of characters (to put it more clearly, 'Hello\u2026'). You need to decode the escapes, and the unicode-escape codec can do that for you.

Note that you can get unicode to recognise it in the same way by specifying the codec argument:

>>> unicode(a, 'unicode-escape')
u'Hellou2026'

But the a.decode() way is nicer.

Answered By: Chris Morgan

Answer 3

>>> a="Hellou2026"
>>> print a.decode('unicode-escape')
Hello…

Answered By: jamylak

Python string to unicode

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