Is there a way to replace Django's smart_str with a Python native solution?

Question

I am passing with a code base that is using the smart_str method of Django:

 for p in pro:
        print smart_str(p["title"])

I want to replace it with a native python solution without involving django inside but I am not sure what smart_str exactly do:

smart_str(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False, errors='strict')

Alias of smart_bytes() on Python 2 and smart_text() on Python 3. This function returns a str or a lazy string.

and

smart_bytes(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False,errors='strict')

Returns a bytestring version of s, encoded as specified in encoding.

If strings_only is True, don’t convert (some) non-string-like objects.

Could we replace it simply with print unicode(u'\xa1').encode("utf-8")?

Answer 1

I replaced it with this dummy function that apply unicode(x).encode("utf-8") if the string is unicode, and convert it to str if it's a number:

def smart_str(x):
    if isinstance(x, unicode):
        return unicode(x).encode("utf-8")
    elif isinstance(x, int) or isinstance(x, float):
        return str(x)
    return x