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I have the following:

u'\x96'

I want to convert it to the following:

'\x96'

Is there any way to do this? str() doesn't work, and when using .encode(...) it changes the encoding. My main goal is to be able to get the following result, so any shortcut to get there would also be accepted:

>>> '\x96'.decode("cp1252")
u'\u2013'

In other words, I have u'\x96' and I want u'\u2013'. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm using Python 2.7.

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6
  • Maybe you could decode to ascii rather than a specific ANSI codepage. Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 9:54
  • @David: But then you can't use anything above \x7f. Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 10:06
  • @Ignacio There won't be anything above \x7f! Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 10:08
  • @David: Did you see the \x96 in the question? Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 10:09
  • @Ignacio I mean after the string has been unicode escaped as per mouad's answer. Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 10:14

2 Answers 2

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u'\x96'.encode('raw_unicode_escape').decode("cp1252")
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1 Comment

This is a bit of a roundabout way. It would have a side-effect of turning any non-ISO-8859-1 character into a \u escape. For example, u'\u00FF\u0100' becomes u'\xff\\u0100'. Maybe you want that; I'd prefer the UnicodeEncodeError, I think.
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Latin-1 is the encoding that directly maps the first 256 characters of Unicode to their byte values.

>>> u'\x96'.encode('latin-1').decode("cp1252")
u'\u2013'
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1 Comment

This would be the usual idiom. latin-1 is an alias for ISO-8859-1.

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