How to make unicode string with python3

I used this :

u = unicode(text, 'utf-8') 

But getting error with Python 3 (or... maybe I just forgot to include something) :

NameError: global name 'unicode' is not defined 

Thank you.

6 Answers

Literal strings are unicode by default in Python3.

Assuming that text is a bytes object, just use text.decode('utf-8')

unicode of Python2 is equivalent to str in Python3, so you can also write:

str(text, 'utf-8') 

if you prefer.

What's new in Python 3.0 says:

All text is Unicode; however encoded Unicode is represented as binary data

If you want to ensure you are outputting utf-8, here's an example from this page on unicode in 3.0:

b'\x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "strict") 

As a workaround, I've been using this:

# Fix Python 2.x. try: UNICODE_EXISTS = bool(type(unicode)) except NameError: unicode = lambda s: str(s) 

This how I solved my problem to convert chars like \uFE0F, \u000A, etc. And also emojis that encoded with 16 bytes.

example = 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla cream\\uD83D\\uDE0D\\uD83D\\uDE0D\\u2764\\uFE0F Present Moment Caf\\u00E8 in St.Augustine\\u2764\\uFE0F\\u2764\\uFE0F ' import codecs new_str = codecs.unicode_escape_decode(example)[0] print(new_str) >>> 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla cream\ud83d\ude0d\ud83d\ude0d❤️ Present Moment Cafè in St.Augustine❤️❤️ ' new_new_str = new_str.encode('utf-16', errors='surrogatepass').decode('utf-16') print(new_new_str) >>> 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla cream😍😍❤️ Present Moment Cafè in St.Augustine❤️❤️ ' 

the easiest way in python 3.x

text = "hi , I'm text" text.encode('utf-8') 

In a Python 2 program that I used for many years there was this line:

ocd[i].namn=unicode(a[:b], 'utf-8') 

This did not work in Python 3.

However, the program turned out to work with:

ocd[i].namn=a[:b] 

I don't remember why I put unicode there in the first place, but I think it was because the name can contains Swedish letters åäöÅÄÖ. But even they work without "unicode".