Unicode encoding/decoding

encoding, python, unicode, utf-8

Solution

Your data is not UTF8 encoded; more likely it is using the Latin-1 encoding:

>>> print st.decode('latin1')
/Märzen

Calling `.decode()` is enough, no need to also call `unicode()`.

Problem

I have a string that looks like this. ``` st = '/M\xe4rzen' ``` I would like to covert this to unicode. How can I do this? I've tried: ``` st.decode('utf-8') unicode(t, 'utf-8') ``` The original file is utf-8 encoded, but I can't seem to get the unicode representation of the string.

Original source