Python file input string: how to handle escaped unicode characters?
- by Michi
In a text file (test.txt), my string looks like this:
Gro\u00DFbritannien
Reading it, python escapes the backslash:
>>> file = open('test.txt', 'r')
>>> input = file.readline()
>>> input
'Gro\\u00DFbritannien'
How can I have this interpreted as unicode? decode() and unicode() won't do the job.
The following code writes Gro\u00DFbritannien back to the file, but I want it to be Großbritannien
>>> input.decode('latin-1')
u'Gro\\u00DFbritannien'
>>> out = codecs.open('out.txt', 'w', 'utf-8')
>>> out.write(input)