Replacing substrings in a list of strings or decoding

Question

I have a list of strings that I will be working in PYTHON happens that some strings contain special characters: üäö and so on.

I have 2 solutions:

1. Treating the acquired data after by replacing the substring in the list of strings.

2. Decoding what is acquired in the list in python.

   lista_names_d = [ 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 2', 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 1', 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 3','L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 5' ]

I tried this

lista_names_d = [name.replace('\xc3\xbc', 'ü') for name in lista_names_d]

This does nothing

I tried this

your_unicode_string = "L\xc3\xbcneburg Kaltenmoor BHKW 1"
correct_unicode_string = your_unicode_string.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')

error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Any help is highly appreciate

Answer 1

What about using the function unicode? This code prints the proper accents:

lista_names_d = [ 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 2', 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 1', 'L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 3','L\xc3\xbcneburg Bockelsberg 5' ]

for item in lista_names_d:
    print(unicode(item, 'utf-8'))

Answer 2

Check encoding documentation:

for city in lista_names_d:
    print city.decode('utf8')
# Lüneburg Bockelsberg 2
# Lüneburg Bockelsberg 1
# Lüneburg Bockelsberg 3
# Lüneburg Bockelsberg 5

from official documentation:

>>> u = unichr(40960) + u'abcd' + unichr(1972)   # Assemble a string
>>> utf8_version = u.encode('utf-8')             # Encode as UTF-8
>>> type(utf8_version), utf8_version
(<type 'str'>, '\xea\x80\x80abcd\xde\xb4')
>>> u2 = utf8_version.decode('utf-8')            # Decode using UTF-8
>>> u == u2                                      # The two strings match
True