Convert unicode with utf-8 string as content to str











up vote
10
down vote

favorite
5












I'm using pyquery to parse a page:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', {'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})
content = dom('#mw-content-text > p').eq(0).text()


but what I get in content is a unicode string with utf-8 encoded content:



u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8...'


how could I convert it to str without lost the content?



to make it clear:



I want conent == 'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'



not conent == u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'










share|improve this question
























  • You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 17:59






  • 1




    Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:00










  • @MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
    – wong2
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:01










  • would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:03






  • 1




    @aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:25















up vote
10
down vote

favorite
5












I'm using pyquery to parse a page:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', {'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})
content = dom('#mw-content-text > p').eq(0).text()


but what I get in content is a unicode string with utf-8 encoded content:



u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8...'


how could I convert it to str without lost the content?



to make it clear:



I want conent == 'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'



not conent == u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'










share|improve this question
























  • You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 17:59






  • 1




    Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:00










  • @MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
    – wong2
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:01










  • would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:03






  • 1




    @aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:25













up vote
10
down vote

favorite
5









up vote
10
down vote

favorite
5






5





I'm using pyquery to parse a page:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', {'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})
content = dom('#mw-content-text > p').eq(0).text()


but what I get in content is a unicode string with utf-8 encoded content:



u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8...'


how could I convert it to str without lost the content?



to make it clear:



I want conent == 'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'



not conent == u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'










share|improve this question















I'm using pyquery to parse a page:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', {'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})
content = dom('#mw-content-text > p').eq(0).text()


but what I get in content is a unicode string with utf-8 encoded content:



u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8...'


how could I convert it to str without lost the content?



to make it clear:



I want conent == 'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'



not conent == u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'







python utf-8 python-2.x mojibake pyquery






share|improve this question















share|improve this question













share|improve this question




share|improve this question








edited Sep 8 at 14:03









Martijn Pieters

696k12924062245




696k12924062245










asked Jan 26 '13 at 17:55









wong2

13.7k2999147




13.7k2999147












  • You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 17:59






  • 1




    Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:00










  • @MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
    – wong2
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:01










  • would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:03






  • 1




    @aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:25


















  • You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 17:59






  • 1




    Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:00










  • @MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
    – wong2
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:01










  • would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
    – Markus Unterwaditzer
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:03






  • 1




    @aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Jan 26 '13 at 18:25
















You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 17:59




You can usually treat unicode strings like normal strings. Is there any reason why you want to convert it?
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 17:59




1




1




Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 18:00




Also, for more information about Unicode, ASCII and the like i recommend: nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 18:00












@MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
– wong2
Jan 26 '13 at 18:01




@MarkusUnterwaditzer if I print content, I just get some strange strings
– wong2
Jan 26 '13 at 18:01












would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 18:03




would content.encode('utf-8') do the trick? Also i think Wikipedia has a proper API to query articles, no need to scrape the website.
– Markus Unterwaditzer
Jan 26 '13 at 18:03




1




1




@aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
– Martijn Pieters
Jan 26 '13 at 18:25




@aychedee: No it won't, that would double encode the UTF-8 data.
– Martijn Pieters
Jan 26 '13 at 18:25












1 Answer
1






active

oldest

votes

















up vote
25
down vote



accepted










If you have a unicode value with UTF-8 bytes, encode to Latin-1 to preserve the 'bytes':



content = content.encode('latin1')


because the Unicode codepoints U+0000 to U+00FF all map one-on-one with the latin-1 encoding; this encoding thus interprets your data as literal bytes.



For your example this gives me:



>>> content = u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1')
'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
u'u5c42u53e0u6837u5f0fu8868'
>>> print content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
层叠样式表


PyQuery uses either requests or urllib to retrieve the HTML, and in the case of requests, uses the .text attribute of the response. This auto-decodes the response data based on the encoding set in a Content-Type header alone, or if that information is not available, uses latin-1 for this (for text responses, but HTML is a text response). You can override this by passing in an encoding argument:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', encoding='utf8',
{'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})


at which point you'd not have to re-encode at all.






share|improve this answer























  • I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
    – spatel
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:53












  • Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:54












  • Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
    – spatel
    Mar 8 '13 at 4:02












  • Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
    – Jacky
    Jan 21 '16 at 11:07










  • thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
    – Rajasankar
    Sep 8 at 3:27











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1 Answer
1






active

oldest

votes








1 Answer
1






active

oldest

votes









active

oldest

votes






active

oldest

votes








up vote
25
down vote



accepted










If you have a unicode value with UTF-8 bytes, encode to Latin-1 to preserve the 'bytes':



content = content.encode('latin1')


because the Unicode codepoints U+0000 to U+00FF all map one-on-one with the latin-1 encoding; this encoding thus interprets your data as literal bytes.



For your example this gives me:



>>> content = u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1')
'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
u'u5c42u53e0u6837u5f0fu8868'
>>> print content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
层叠样式表


PyQuery uses either requests or urllib to retrieve the HTML, and in the case of requests, uses the .text attribute of the response. This auto-decodes the response data based on the encoding set in a Content-Type header alone, or if that information is not available, uses latin-1 for this (for text responses, but HTML is a text response). You can override this by passing in an encoding argument:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', encoding='utf8',
{'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})


at which point you'd not have to re-encode at all.






share|improve this answer























  • I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
    – spatel
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:53












  • Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:54












  • Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
    – spatel
    Mar 8 '13 at 4:02












  • Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
    – Jacky
    Jan 21 '16 at 11:07










  • thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
    – Rajasankar
    Sep 8 at 3:27















up vote
25
down vote



accepted










If you have a unicode value with UTF-8 bytes, encode to Latin-1 to preserve the 'bytes':



content = content.encode('latin1')


because the Unicode codepoints U+0000 to U+00FF all map one-on-one with the latin-1 encoding; this encoding thus interprets your data as literal bytes.



For your example this gives me:



>>> content = u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1')
'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
u'u5c42u53e0u6837u5f0fu8868'
>>> print content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
层叠样式表


PyQuery uses either requests or urllib to retrieve the HTML, and in the case of requests, uses the .text attribute of the response. This auto-decodes the response data based on the encoding set in a Content-Type header alone, or if that information is not available, uses latin-1 for this (for text responses, but HTML is a text response). You can override this by passing in an encoding argument:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', encoding='utf8',
{'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})


at which point you'd not have to re-encode at all.






share|improve this answer























  • I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
    – spatel
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:53












  • Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:54












  • Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
    – spatel
    Mar 8 '13 at 4:02












  • Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
    – Jacky
    Jan 21 '16 at 11:07










  • thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
    – Rajasankar
    Sep 8 at 3:27













up vote
25
down vote



accepted







up vote
25
down vote



accepted






If you have a unicode value with UTF-8 bytes, encode to Latin-1 to preserve the 'bytes':



content = content.encode('latin1')


because the Unicode codepoints U+0000 to U+00FF all map one-on-one with the latin-1 encoding; this encoding thus interprets your data as literal bytes.



For your example this gives me:



>>> content = u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1')
'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
u'u5c42u53e0u6837u5f0fu8868'
>>> print content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
层叠样式表


PyQuery uses either requests or urllib to retrieve the HTML, and in the case of requests, uses the .text attribute of the response. This auto-decodes the response data based on the encoding set in a Content-Type header alone, or if that information is not available, uses latin-1 for this (for text responses, but HTML is a text response). You can override this by passing in an encoding argument:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', encoding='utf8',
{'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})


at which point you'd not have to re-encode at all.






share|improve this answer














If you have a unicode value with UTF-8 bytes, encode to Latin-1 to preserve the 'bytes':



content = content.encode('latin1')


because the Unicode codepoints U+0000 to U+00FF all map one-on-one with the latin-1 encoding; this encoding thus interprets your data as literal bytes.



For your example this gives me:



>>> content = u'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1')
'xe5xb1x82xe5x8fxa0xe6xa0xb7xe5xbcx8fxe8xa1xa8'
>>> content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
u'u5c42u53e0u6837u5f0fu8868'
>>> print content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
层叠样式表


PyQuery uses either requests or urllib to retrieve the HTML, and in the case of requests, uses the .text attribute of the response. This auto-decodes the response data based on the encoding set in a Content-Type header alone, or if that information is not available, uses latin-1 for this (for text responses, but HTML is a text response). You can override this by passing in an encoding argument:



dom = PyQuery('http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php', encoding='utf8',
{'title': 'CSS', 'printable': 'yes', 'variant': 'zh-cn'})


at which point you'd not have to re-encode at all.







share|improve this answer














share|improve this answer



share|improve this answer








edited Sep 8 at 14:08

























answered Jan 26 '13 at 18:18









Martijn Pieters

696k12924062245




696k12924062245












  • I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
    – spatel
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:53












  • Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:54












  • Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
    – spatel
    Mar 8 '13 at 4:02












  • Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
    – Jacky
    Jan 21 '16 at 11:07










  • thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
    – Rajasankar
    Sep 8 at 3:27


















  • I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
    – spatel
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:53












  • Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Mar 7 '13 at 23:54












  • Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
    – spatel
    Mar 8 '13 at 4:02












  • Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
    – Jacky
    Jan 21 '16 at 11:07










  • thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
    – Rajasankar
    Sep 8 at 3:27
















I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
– spatel
Mar 7 '13 at 23:53






I had the same problem, but your solution only works from the REPL, not from a script. I had to change it to be like this: content.encode('latin1').decode('utf8').encode('utf8')
– spatel
Mar 7 '13 at 23:53














Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
– Martijn Pieters
Mar 7 '13 at 23:54






Encoding to UTF-8 is fine if that is what you need in the end. But you can skip the decode then too!
– Martijn Pieters
Mar 7 '13 at 23:54














Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
– spatel
Mar 8 '13 at 4:02






Well I'll be, I should have tried that so I could save myself some self inflicted trauma to the head. I have to admit though, it still confuses me.
– spatel
Mar 8 '13 at 4:02














Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
– Jacky
Jan 21 '16 at 11:07




Thanks! Been tortured by the same issue for one day!
– Jacky
Jan 21 '16 at 11:07












thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
– Rajasankar
Sep 8 at 3:27




thanks a lot for this workaround. I was able to convert tamil unicode to readable format.
– Rajasankar
Sep 8 at 3:27


















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