CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonunicodeutf-8xbmc
user3667173
user3667173

Reputation:

how to convert from unicode to utf8 in python?

I'm working on my python script to extract the data from sqlite3 database for xbmc media application.

I can see that in my code it will extract the data using the unicode object where I will have the strings (u', u and L.

I want to convert it back to normal strings from unicode object to utf8.

Here is the code:

programs = None
daysLimit = 14
start = datetime.datetime.now()
end = start + datetime.timedelta(days = daysLimit)
cur.execute('SELECT channel, title, start_date, stop_date FROM programs WHERE channel')
programs = cur.fetchall()

print(programs)
cur.close()

Here is the xbmc log:

03:49:03 T:3628  NOTICE: [(u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Middle -  The Ditch',
20140520170000L, 20140520173000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Goonies', 
20140520173000L, 20140520200000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides', 
20140520200000L, 20140520230000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The 700 Club', 
20140520230000L, 20140521000000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -  Day Damn One', 
20140521000000L, 20140521003000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -  Lucky Charm', 
20140521003000L, 20140521010000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -  The Ethnic Tip', 
20140521010000L, 20140521013000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -  The Young and the Restless', 
20140521013000L, 20140521020000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'Summer Sexy With T25!', 
20140521020000L, 20140521023000L), (u'101 ABC FAMILY ', u'Paid Programming', 
20140521023000L, 20140521030000L)

I want to ignore the strings (u', u and L so I want to make it look like this:

'101 ABC FAMILY ', 'The Middle -  The Ditch', 20140520170000, 20140520173000, 
'101 ABC FAMILY ', 'The Goonies', 20140520173000, 20140520200000, 
'101 ABC FAMILY ', 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides', 20140520200000, 20140520230000, 
'101 ABC FAMILY ', 'The 700 Club', 20140520230000, 20140521000000, 
'101 ABC FAMILY ', 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -  Day Damn One', 20140521000000, 20140521003000,
and so on...

Can you please tell me how i can convert from unicode object to utf8 using python 2.6 version?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4435

Answers (2)

dt0xff
dt0xff

Reputation: 1563

Your problem is that you are trying to display data, INSTEAD you are displaying python representation if this object.

So it contains meta-data like u, L, etc. If you want to display data the way you want, you should write a code to deal with it.

For example:

for row in cur.fetchall():
    print u"'{row[0]}', '{row[1]}', '{row[2]}', '{row[3]}', '{row[4]}'".format(row=row)

So it will look like

'1', '2', '3', '4'
'1', '2', '3', '4'
'1', '2', '3', '4'

But... as I can see, you make structure look like CSV-file(comma-separated values), do you? So, maybe, you should read about csv python module?

Upvotes: 0

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1124170

  • The L postfixes signify long integers. They are the same thing as (short) integers really; there really is no need to convert these. It is only their repr() output that includes the L; print the value directly or write it to a file and the L postfix is not included.

  • Unicode values can be encoded to UTF-8 with the unicode.encode() method:

    encoded = unicodestr.encode('utf8')

Your beef is with the list representation here; you logged all rows, and Python containers represent their contents by calling repr() on each value. These representations are great for debugging as their types are made obvious.

It depends on what you do with these values next. It is generally a good idea to use Unicode throughout your code, and only encode at the last moment (when writing to a file, or printing or sending over the network). A good many methods handle this for you. Printing will encode to your terminal codec automatically, for example. When adding to an XML file, most XML libraries handle Unicode for you. Etc.

Upvotes: 2

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