Is there any function like iconv in Python?

Question

I have some CSV files need to convert from shift-jis to utf-8.

Here is my code in PHP, which is successful transcode to readable text.

$str = utf8_decode($str);
$str = iconv('shift-jis', 'utf-8'. '//TRANSLIT', $str);
echo $str;

My problem is how to do same thing in Python.

Answer 1

I don't know PHP, but does this work :

mystring.decode('shift-jis').encode('utf-8') ?

Also I assume the CSV content is from a file. There are a few options for opening a file in python.

with open(myfile, 'rb') as fin

would be the first and you would get data as it is

with open(myfile, 'r') as fin

would be the default file opening

Also I tried on my computed with a shift-js text and the following code worked :

with open("shift.txt" , "rb") as  fin :
    text = fin.read()

text.decode('shift-jis').encode('utf-8')

result was the following in UTF-8 (without any errors)

' \xe3\x81\xa6 \xe3\x81\xa7 \xe3\x81\xa8'

Ok I validate my solution :)

The first char is indeed the good character: "\xe3\x81\xa6" means "E3 81 A6" It gives the correct result.

You can try yourself at this URL