Python string to unicode [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do I treat an ASCII string as unicode and unescape the escaped characters in it in python?
How do convert unicode escape sequences to unicode characters in a python string

I have a string that contains unicode characters e.g. \u2026 etc. Somehow it is not received to me as unicode, but is received as a str. How do I convert it back to unicode?

>>> a="Hello\u2026" >>> b=u"Hello\u2026" >>> print a Hello\u2026 >>> print b Hello… >>> print unicode(a) Hello\u2026 >>>  

So clearly unicode(a) is not the answer. Then what is?

Answer 1

Unicode escapes only work in unicode strings, so this

 a="\u2026" 

is actually a string of 6 characters: '\', 'u', '2', '0', '2', '6'.

To make unicode out of this, use decode('unicode-escape'):

a="\u2026" print repr(a) print repr(a.decode('unicode-escape'))  ## '\\u2026' ## u'\u2026' 

Answer 2

Decode it with the unicode-escape codec:

>>> a="Hello\u2026" >>> a.decode('unicode-escape') u'Hello\u2026' >>> print _ Hello… 

This is because for a non-unicode string the \u2026 is not recognised but is instead treated as a literal series of characters (to put it more clearly, 'Hello\\u2026'). You need to decode the escapes, and the unicode-escape codec can do that for you.

Note that you can get unicode to recognise it in the same way by specifying the codec argument:

>>> unicode(a, 'unicode-escape') u'Hello\u2026' 

But the a.decode() way is nicer.