How to decode a text with unicodes like \u00e7 in python?

Question

Hi I receive texts from via library, when I print the received text I see some non-english characters as "\u00e7" which must be "ç" instead. I guess somehow I need to encode and re-decode the text, but I am very new to python and I do not if it is the right approach. Can you please enlighten my way?

Answer 1

Decode the string using unicode_escape encoding:

>>> s = r'\u00e7'
>>> print s
\u00e7
>>> print s.decode('unicode-escape')
ç
>>> 

If sys.stdout.encoding is ascii, print will raise UnicodeEncodeError; In such case, encode it explicitly:

>>> print s.decode('unicode-escape').encode('utf-8')
ç