Fastest way to convert a dict's keys & values from str to Unicode?

Question

I'm working with a counter from collections import Counter and I want to print its values using matplotlib.pylot.

When I try to do it using:

plt.bar(range(len(cnt)), cnt.values(), align='center')
plt.xticks(range(len(cnt)), cnt.keys())
plt.show()

I get the following error:

ValueError: matplotlib display text must have all code points < 128 or use Unicode strings

That's why I'm trying to convert the Counter dictionary keys to Unicode.

Answer 1

If you're using Python 2.7, you can use a dict comprehension:

unidict = {k.decode('utf8'): v.decode('utf8') for k, v in strdict.items()}

For older versions:

unidict = dict((k.decode('utf8'), v.decode('utf8')) for k, v in strdict.items())

(This assumes your strings are in UTF-8, of course.)