Question

I’m scraping info from Facebook which compiles weirdly. The source for a page returns the name “Trentemøller” as a regular string with a unicode character:

Trentem\u00f8ller

When I try to print that or commit it to a list print u'%s' % name or print unicode(name) it escape-sequences the backslash.

u'Trentem\\u00f8ller'

['foo', 'bar', u'Trentem\u00f8ller']

What is the proper way to treat this string? Ideally it would save it into the list in a u'' but not the added backslash.

Answer 1

If you’re in control of forming the unicode string, then use just one backslash:

>>> print u'Trentem\u00f8ller'
Trentemøller

If the regular string has already been formed by the screen scaper, you will need to re-evaluate the string to transform the backslash escape sequences into a real unicode characters. The eval builtin would tempting, but it is safer to use ast.literal_eval instead:

>>> import ast
>>> s = 'Trentem\u00f8ller'                   # a regular string
>>> print ast.literal_eval('u"""' + s + '"""')
Trentemøller