How to change a string to Unicode in Python 2?

Question

I have a string like s1 = \"\\xed\\xf3\\xb4\\x90\".

>>> x = u\"\\xed\\xf3\\xb4\\x90\"
>>> print x
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How co

Answer 1

The correct codec to be used here is 'latin1':

>>> s1= "\xed\xf3\xb4\x90"
>>> print s1.decode('latin1')  # same as: unicode(s1, 'latin1')
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However using 'unicode-escape' also works here as 'unicode-escape' assumes the bytes are encoded in 'latin1' and there are no unicode escapes in the OP's string:

>>> s1= "\xed\xf3\xb4\x90"
>>> print s1.decode('unicode-escape')  # same as: unicode(s1, 'unicode-escape')
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Answer 2

In this case you can decode the str with the latin1 codec.