Printing escaped Unicode in Python

Question

>>> s = 'auszuschließen'
>>> print(s.encode('ascii', errors='xmlcharrefreplace'))
b'auszuschließen'
>>> print(str(s.encode('ascii', errors='xmlcharrefreplace'), 'ascii'))
auszuschließen

Is there a prettier way to print any string without the b''?

EDIT:

I'm just trying to print escaped characters from Python, and my only gripe is that Python adds "b''" when i do that.

If i wanted to see the actual character in a dumb terminal like Windows 7's, then i get this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Mailgen.py", line 378, in <module>
    marked_copy = mark_markup(language_column, item_row)
  File "Mailgen.py", line 210, in mark_markup
    print("TP: %r" % "".join(to_print))
  File "c:\python32\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 19, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_map)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2026' in position 29: character maps to <undefined>

Answer 1

>>> s='auszuschließen…'
>>> s
'auszuschließen…'
>>> print(s)
auszuschließen…
>>> b=s.encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace')
>>> b
b'auszuschließen…'
>>> print(b)
b'auszuschließen…'
>>> b.decode()
'auszuschließen…'
>>> print(b.decode())
auszuschließen…

You start out with a Unicode string. Encoding it to ascii creates a bytes object with the characters you want. Python won't print it without converting it back into a string and the default conversion puts in the b and quotes. Using decode explicitly converts it back to a string; the default encoding is utf-8, and since your bytes only consist of ascii which is a subset of utf-8 it is guaranteed to work.