Fastest way to convert a dict's keys & values from str to Unicode?

Question

I\'m working with a counter from collections import Counter and I want to print its values using matplotlib.pylot.

When I try to do it usin

Answer 1

So, i thought the op asked for unicode, not for UTF-8. Unicode is not an encoding, it's just actual text. So would this not be more accurate and/or readable?

unidict = {unicode(k): unicode(v) for k, v in strdict.items()}

Answer 2

If you're using Python 2.7, you can use a dict comprehension:

unidict = {k.decode('utf8'): v.decode('utf8') for k, v in strdict.items()}

For older versions:

unidict = dict((k.decode('utf8'), v.decode('utf8')) for k, v in strdict.items())

(This assumes your strings are in UTF-8, of course.)