how to convert string from known encoding to utf-8 on the fly in python?

Question

I know about codecs library, but I don't want to write string to file.

Is there a way to hold resulting string in variable?

Answer 1

Let's assume you have a string s encode in encoding . To get the same string in UTF-8 , you can use

s.decode(encoding).encode("utf-8")

Answer 2

If you have an ascii encoded file,f:

1)f1=unicode(f) 2)f2=f1.encode('utf-8')

I this way, you get rid of errors like:"UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\\xdf' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)"