How to make unicode string with python3

I used this :

u = unicode(text, 'utf-8')

But getting error with Python 3 (or… maybe I just forgot to include something) :

NameError: global name 'unicode' is not defined

Thank you.

Answers:

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Method 1

Literal strings are unicode by default in Python3.

Assuming that text is a bytes object, just use text.decode('utf-8')

unicode of Python2 is equivalent to str in Python3, so you can also write:

str(text, 'utf-8')

if you prefer.

Method 2

What’s new in Python 3.0 says:

All text is Unicode; however encoded Unicode is represented as binary
data

If you want to ensure you are outputting utf-8, here’s an example from this page on unicode in 3.0:

b'x80abc'.decode("utf-8", "strict")

Method 3

As a workaround, I’ve been using this:

# Fix Python 2.x.
try:
    UNICODE_EXISTS = bool(type(unicode))
except NameError:
    unicode = lambda s: str(s)

Method 4

This how I solved my problem to convert chars like uFE0F, u000A, etc. And also emojis that encoded with 16 bytes.

example = 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla cream\uD83D\uDE0D\uD83D\uDE0D\u2764\uFE0F Present Moment Caf\u00E8 in St.Augustine\u2764\uFE0F\u2764\uFE0F '
import codecs
new_str = codecs.unicode_escape_decode(example)[0]
print(new_str)
>>> 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla creamud83dude0dud83dude0d❤️ Present Moment Cafè in St.Augustine❤️❤️ '
new_new_str = new_str.encode('utf-16', errors='surrogatepass').decode('utf-16')
print(new_new_str)
>>> 'raw vegan chocolate cocoa pie w chocolate & vanilla cream😍😍❤️ Present Moment Cafè in St.Augustine❤️❤️ '

Method 5

the easiest way in python 3.x

text = "hi , I'm text"
text.encode('utf-8')

Method 6

In a Python 2 program that I used for many years there was this line:

ocd[i].namn=unicode(a[:b], 'utf-8')

This did not work in Python 3.

However, the program turned out to work with:

ocd[i].namn=a[:b]

I don’t remember why I put unicode there in the first place, but I think it was because the name can contains Swedish letters åäöÅÄÖ. But even they work without “unicode”.

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