Converting a latin string to unicode in python

Question

I am working o scrapy, I scraped some sites and stored the items from the scraped page in to json files, but some of them are containing the following format.

Answer 1

You have byte strings containing unicode escapes. You can convert them to unicode with the unicode_escape codec:

>>> print "H\u00eatres et \u00e9tang".decode("unicode_escape")
Hêtres et étang

And you can encode it back to byte strings:

>>> s = "H\u00eatres et \u00e9tang".decode("unicode_escape")
>>> s.encode("latin1")
'H\xeatres et \xe9tang'

You can filter and decode the non-unicode strings like:

for s in l: 
    if not isinstance(s, unicode): 
        print s.decode('unicode_escape')