Question

myString = 'éíěřáé'

I need to decode this string to unicode.
Is there any difference between folowing usages and between these two methods in general?

myString.decode(encoding='UTF-8', errors='ignore')

and

unicode(myString, encoding='UTF-8', errors='ignore')

Answer 1

The unicode constructor can take other types apart from strings:

>>> unicode(10)
u'10'

For the bytestring case, however, the two forms are mostly equivalent. Some encoding options are not valid for the unicode constructor as they do not result in unicode output, but are valid for the .decode method of bytestrings, such as 'hex':

>>> unicode('10', encoding='hex')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: decoder did not return an unicode object (type=str)