How to decode unicode raw literals to readable string?

Question

If I assign unicode raw literals to a variable, I can read its value:

>>> s =  u'\u0421\u043e\u043e\u0431\u0449\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u043e'
>>> s
u'\u0421\u043e\u043e\u0431\u0449\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u043e'
>>> print s
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But when I have already assigned value to a plain, not unicode string, I can not:

>>> s =  '\u0421\u043e\u043e\u0431\u0449\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u043e'
>>> s
'\\u0421\\u043e\\u043e\\u0431\\u0449\\u0435\\u043d\\u0438\\u0435 \\u043e\\u0442\\u043f\\u0440\\u0430\\u0432\\u043b\\u0435\\u043d\\u043e'
>>> print s
\u0421\u043e\u043e\u0431\u0449\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435 \u043e\u0442\u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043b\u0435\u043d\u043e

How can I decode and read it?

score 34 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 29 '14 at 19:44

34

Use the unicode_escape codec:

s.decode('unicode_escape')

edited Dec 29 '14 at 19:44

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answered Jun 28 '11 at 09:41

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3

(The reason is that '\uXXXX' is *verbatim* in a non-Unicode string literal.) – Jun 28 '11 at 16:08
Found the best solution ever specially for Russian Characters – Mayur Koshti Sep 06 '16 at 12:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 19 '16 at 13:22

If you are getting weird results when decoding try following

print repr(s).decode('unicode-escape').encode('latin-1') // or encode using some other encoding

It could be that python terminal is using default ASCII and there is symbol that goes out of range.

How to decode unicode raw literals to readable string?

2 Answers2

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