Decoding utf8 literal python

Question

I am trying to decode strings in a list of strings, for example 'caf\\xc3\\xab' what I want if this to be 'café'.

I tried some things but ran into problems.

when i do:

for i in range(len(words):
 words[i] = words[i].decode("utf8")

I still need to convert to byte type but how do I do this,

also when I do it like this I need to remove the double backslashes for this to work

b'caf\\xc3\\xab'.decode("utf8")

• panda912: python2's str is bytes, you can just use unicode or ues python3 (in python3 str is unicode)
• Loïc Noest: I use python3 but read the strings from a file in that specific format
• lenz: words.decode() is not an in-place operation, you need to capture the return value: word = word.decode("utf8"). (Further note: this will only change the value of the loop variable word, but not the elements in words.)

Answer 1

Suppose you have string as follow:

bef = 'caf\\xc3\\xab'

To convert to 'café' you can do the following:

aft = bef.encode().decode('unicode-escape').encode('latin1').decode('utf-8')

Then print(aft) should show 'café'