UTF-8 characters in python string even after decoding from UTF-8?

Question

I’m working on converting portions of XHTML to JSON objects. I finally got everything in JSON form, but some UTF-8 character codes are being printed.
Example:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "Iu2019m not on Earth."
  }
}

This should be:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I'm not on Earth."
  }
}

This is just one example of UTF-8 codes coming through. How can I got through the string and replace every instance of a UTF-8 code with the character it represents?

Asked By: Tamoor Hamid

||

Source

Answer 1

u2019 is not a UTF-8 character, but a Unicode escape code. It’s valid JSON and when read back via json.load will become ’ (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK).

If you want to write the actual character, use ensure_ascii=False to prevent escape codes from being written for non-ASCII characters:

with open('output.json','w',encoding='utf8') as f:
    json.dump(data, f, ensure_ascii=False, indent=2)

Answered By: Mark Tolonen

Answer 2

You didn’T paste your code, so I don’t kwon how you converted XHTML to JSON. I assume that you ended with hex value characters in Python objects. This u2019 is a single character with a 16-bit hex value. The JSON module can handle this by default. For example, the json.loads method can fix that:

x = '''{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I\u2019m not on Earth."
  }
}'''

print(x)
x_json=json.loads(x)
print(x_json)

Output shows:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "Iu2019m not on Earth."
  }
}

{'p': {'@class': 'para-p', '#text': 'I’m not on Earth.'}}

Answered By: RobertG

UTF-8 characters in python string even after decoding from UTF-8?

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