How to unescape unicode inside a string

Question

My code loads the title of a youtube video.

I have problem with accented and special characters

For Example: i'm getting this title in string format: LES \\xc9TUDES DE M\\xc9DECINE

I need to remove the double backslash to get LES \xc9TUDES DE M\xc9DECINE

So i can be able to print it correctly in python 3:

print(`LES \xc9TUDES DE M\xc9DECINE`)
>>LES ÉTUDES DE MÉDECINE

Thank you

What python version are you using, how exactly are you getting your string? What exactly is the type of the object you are working with? `str` or `bytes`? — juanpa.arrivillaga, Feb 07 '17 at 18:28
Thanks, changed the title. I'm using 3.5, i'm sure it's a string object — HazimoRa3d, Feb 07 '17 at 18:28
Possible duplicate of [How do I un-escape a backslash-escaped string in python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1885181/how-do-i-un-escape-a-backslash-escaped-string-in-python) Spoiler alert: `bytes(s, 'utf8').decode('unicode_escape')` — juanpa.arrivillaga, Feb 07 '17 at 18:39
It would help if you actually used valid Python literals next time... — juanpa.arrivillaga, Feb 07 '17 at 18:40

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '17 at 18:40

You can use the literal_eval function like so:

Python 3.6.0 (v3.6.0:41df79263a11, Dec 23 2016, 08:06:12) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>> import ast
>>> ast.literal_eval("'LES \\xc9TUDES DE M\\xc9DECINE'")
'LES ÉTUDES DE MÉDECINE'

How to unescape unicode inside a string

1 Answers1