How to convert a unicode string with str type to a real unicode string in python2?

Question

I'm trying to convert a str string '\u4e2d\u56fd' to unicode u'\u4e2d\u56fd'. It's the same thing in python3, but how to do it in python2.7?

I have tried decode, encode, str, bytes, unicode and others, but they all didn't work.

a = '\u4e2d\u56fd'
b = u'\u4e2d\u56fd'
print a
print b

And the result of the code above is

\u4e2d\u56fd
中国

All I want to do is to convert a to b.

Thanks for any tip!

Answer 1

You need to use raw_unicode_escape codec. For example:

a = '\u4e2d\u56fd'
a = a.decode('raw_unicode_escape')
print a
中国

Answer 2

you should write in the header of .py file # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
a = '\u4e2d\u56fd'
print a

or try that

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')