How do I treat an ASCII string as unicode and unescape the escaped characters in it in python?

Question

For example, if I have a unicode string, I can encode it as an ASCII string like so:

>>> u'\u003cfoo/\u003e'.encode('ascii') '<foo/>' 

However, I have e.g. this ASCII string:

'\u003foo\u003e' 

... that I want to turn into the same ASCII string as in my first example above:

'<foo/>' 

Answer 1

It took me a while to figure this one out, but this page had the best answer:

>>> s = '\u003cfoo/\u003e' >>> s.decode( 'unicode-escape' ) u'<foo/>' >>> s.decode( 'unicode-escape' ).encode( 'ascii' ) '<foo/>' 

There's also a 'raw-unicode-escape' codec to handle the other way to specify Unicode strings -- check the "Unicode Constructors" section of the linked page for more details (since I'm not that Unicode-saavy).

EDIT: See also Python Standard Encodings.