Python unicode string with UTF-8?

Question

I'm getting back from a library what looks to be an incorrect unicode string:

>>> title
u'Sopet\xc3\xb3n'

Now, those two hex escapes there are the UTF-8 encoding for U+00F3 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE. So far as I understand, a unicode string in Python should have the actual character, not the the UTF-8 encoding for the character, so I think this is incorrect and presumably a bug either in the library or in my input, right?

The question is, how do I (a) recognize that I have UTF-8 encoded text in my unicode string, and (b) convert this to a proper unicode string?

I'm stumped on (a), as there's nothing wrong, encoding-wise, about that original string (i.e, both are valid characters in their own right, u'\xc3\xb3' == ó, but they're not what's supposed to be there)

It looks like I can achieve (b) by eval()ing that repr() output minus the "u" in front to get a str and then decoding the str with UTF-8:

>>> eval(repr(title)[1:]).decode("utf-8")
u'Sopet\xf3n'
>>> print eval(repr(title)[1:]).decode("utf-8")
Sopetón

But that seems a bit kludgy. Is there an officially-sanctioned way to get the raw data out of a unicode string and treat that as a regular string?

Answer 1

a) Try to put it through the method below.

b)

>>> u'Sopet\xc3\xb3n'.encode('latin-1').decode('utf-8')
u'Sopet\xf3n'