text with unicode escape sequences to unicode in python

Question

suppose I have the string

test
'\\u0259'

Note the escaped backslash.

How do I convert it to the respective unicode string?

kennytm · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-10T05:22:59.687

39

>>> print('test \\u0259'.decode('unicode-escape'))
test ə

edited Mar 10 '21 at 05:22

answered Oct 23 '10 at 14:24

kennytm

16

+1. Note that if you run python 3.x, you'll need `print(bytes('test \\u0259', 'ascii').decode('unicode-escape'))` instead. – Frédéric Hamidi Oct 23 '10 at 14:28
3

How to get symbol **ə** without `print`? – Vladimir Chub Oct 14 '13 at 06:54
2

`bytes('test \\u0259', 'ascii')` == `b'test \\u0259'` – Bachsau Mar 24 '18 at 11:53
what if we need to store the text in a json file – Syed Adnan Haider Jan 08 '21 at 12:33
@FrédéricHamidi your answer from 2010 saved my brain from melting down here in 2021. Legend. SO says avoid "+1" stuff, but this deserved a special mention. – tgmerritt Mar 09 '21 at 14:41
Alternatively to using `bytes`, you can just chain encode and decode if you start out with a unicode-string (Python 3). `'test \\u0259'.encode('ascii').decode('unicode-escape')` – timgeb Jun 28 '22 at 09:32

1 Answers1