Python - How can I do a string find on a Unicode character that is a variable?

Question

This works

s = 'jiā'
s.find(u'\u0101')

How do I do something like this:

s = 'jiā'
zzz = '\u0101'
s.find(zzz)

Since I'm using a variable now, how do I indicate the string represented by the variable is Unicode?

Answer 1

Since I'm using a variable now, how do I indicate the string represented by the variable is Unicode?

By defining it as a Unicode string in the first place.

zzz = u"foo"

Or, if you already have a string in some other encoding, by converting it to Unicode (the original encoding must be specified if the string is non-ASCII).

zzz = unicode(zzz, encoding="latin1")

Or by using Python 3 where all strings are Unicode.

Answer 2

zzz as defined in your post is a plain str object, not a unicode object, so there is no way to indicate that it is something it actually isn't. You can convert the str object to a unicode object, though, by specifying an encoding:

s.find(zzz.decode("utf-8"))

Substitue utf-8 by whatever encoding the string is encoded in.

Note that in your example

zzz = '\u0101'

zzz is a plain string of length 6. There is no easy way to fix this wrong string literal afterwards, except for hacks along the lines of

ast.literal_eval("u'" + zzz + "'")