Print LIST of unicode chars without escape characters

Question

If you have a string as below, with unicode chars, you can print it, and get the unescaped version:

>>> s = \"äåö\"
>>> s
\'\\xc3\\xa4\\xc3         


        

Answer 1

When you print a string, you get the output of the __str__ method of the object - in this case the string without quotes. The __str__ method of a list is different, it creates a string containing the opening and closing [] and the string produced by the __repr__ method of each object contained within. What you're seeing is the difference between __str__ and __repr__.

You can build your own string instead:

print '[' + ','.join("'" + str(x) + "'" for x in s) + ']'

This version should work on both Unicode and byte strings in Python 2:

print u'[' + u','.join(u"'" + unicode(x) + u"'" for x in s) + u']'