Cannot convert unicode to utf-8 in python

Question

It must be a trivial task but I can't handle it. I have json that looks like this.

        {'
          city': u'\\u0410\\u0431\\u0430\\u043a\\u0430\\u043d', 
        'language':{
          u'\\u0410\\u043d\\u0433\\u043b\\u0438\\u0439\\u0441\\u043a\\u0438\\u0439': 5608,      
          u'\\u0418\\u0442\\u0430\\u043b\\u044c\\u044f\\u043d\\u0441\\u043a\\u0438\\u0439': 98
        }
    },

I'm trying to convert the unicode strings into utf-8.

string=u'\u0410\u0431\u0430\u043a\u0430\u043d'
string.encode('utf-8')

I've got

'\xd0\x90\xd0\xb1\xd0\xb0\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0\xd0\xbd'

Instead of:

u'Абакан'

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What am I doing wrong?

Not printing it.

When you just evaluate a string in Python REPL, you will get its repr . This is '\\xd0\\x90\\xd0\\xb1\\xd0\\xb0\\xd0\\xba\\xd0\\xb0\\xd0\\xbd' . When you print it, you will get Абакан .

print(string.encode('utf-8'))

Answer 2

As @Amadan said, you just need to print your string.

But why printing string resolves the problem?

The answer is that if you type string + Enter this will lead to display the representation of repr() the of the object string ; while running print string (or print (string) in Python 3.x) you will get a human readable string representation - str() - of string .

>>> converted = string.encode('utf8')
>>> converted
'\xd0\x90\xd0\xb1\xd0\xb0\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0\xd0\xbd'
>>> print converted
Абакан
>>> print repr(converted)
'\xd0\x90\xd0\xb1\xd0\xb0\xd0\xba\xd0\xb0\xd0\xbd'
>>> print str(converted)
Абакан
>>> 

Further reading: Difference between __str__ and __repr__ in Python