representing a sequence of byte strings in Farsi format

Question

I have a sequence of UTF-8 characters, for example something like this:

\xd8\xa2\xd8\xb4\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xdb\x8c\xdb\x8c \xd8\xa8\xd8\xa7 \xd8\xa2\xd8\xb1\xd9\x85\xd8\xa7\xd9\x86 \xd9\xbe\xd8\xb1\xd9\x88\xda\x98\xd9\x87 \xd9\x84\xd8\xba\xd8\xaa \xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87 \xd8\xa2\xd8\xb2\xd8\xa7\xd8\xaf

which I know is from a Farsi website and should represent some Farsi words. How can I represent this sequence with Farsi characters?

I am using Python for my work.

This is different as in the reference question characters all are started with \u, but in my case the look like all start with \x. — TJ1, May 10 '14 at 22:57
I suggest you read https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html — jonrsharpe, May 10 '14 at 23:07
jonrsharpe: I looked at your suggestion, it does not say how to convert sequence of byte strings to Farsi characters. — TJ1, May 11 '14 at 03:30
They *are* Farsi characters, represented in ASCII; could you be more specific about the problem? Do you want to `print` the characters? Save them out to a file? — jonrsharpe, May 11 '14 at 07:23

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered May 11 '14 at 12:23

You just need to treat the sequence of bytes as a sequence of bytes by preceding the literal with the letter b, and then decoding as UTF-8. Like so:

$ python3
>>> text = b'\xd8\xa2\xd8\xb4\xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xdb\x8c\xdb\x8c \xd8\xa8\xd8\xa7 \xd8\xa2\xd8\xb1\xd9\x85\xd8\xa7\xd9\x86 \xd9\xbe\xd8\xb1\xd9\x88\xda\x98\xd9\x87 \xd9\x84\xd8\xba\xd8\xaa \xd9\x86\xd8\xa7\xd9\x85\xd9\x87 \xd8\xa2\xd8\xb2\xd8\xa7\xd8\xaf'
>>> text.decode('utf-8')
'آشنایی با آرمان پروژه لغت نامه آزاد'

Thanks you very much, this is exactly what I wanted and resolved the issue. — TJ1, May 11 '14 at 14:20

representing a sequence of byte strings in Farsi format

1 Answers1