How to convert python Unicode string to bytes

Question

I have a string x as below

x = "\xe9\x94\x99\xe8\xaf\xaf"

This string should be Unicode string, but cannot be displayed (print) correctly.

And the string y is Unicode string/ bytes started with b, And y can be displayed correctly by y.decode('utf-8')

y = b"\xe9\x94\x99\xe8\xaf\xaf"

My question is how to convert x to y ?

• Right leg: How are those supposed to be displayed? My Windows sees "é[x][x]è" for x, and "[x][x]" for y.

Answer 1

Assuming we're talking about Python3, the Unicode string x is 6 code points long. It happens to be that each of those code points is in range 0x00 to 0xff (ASCII subset). We can get the exact byte string with the raw_unicode_escape codec, like this:

>>> x = "\xe9\x94\x99\xe8\xaf\xaf"
>>> y = x.encode('raw_unicode_escape')
>>> y
b'\xe9\x94\x99\xe8\xaf\xaf'
>>> y.decode('utf8')
'错误'

Note that this will only work if the string x contains only ASCII subrange of Unicode; otherwise you'll just get escaped Unicode code points (as the codec's name suggests):

>>> "šž".encode('raw_unicode_escape')
b'\\u0161\\u017e'