Transform unicode string in python

Question

{u'Status': u'OK', u'City': u'Ciri\xe8', u'TimezoneName': '', u'ZipPostalCode': '', u'CountryCode': u'IT', u'Dstoffset': u'0', u'Ip': u'x.x.x.x', u'Longitude': u'7.6', u'CountryName': u'Italy', u'RegionCode': u'12', u'Latitude': u'45.2333', u'Isdst': '', u'Gmtoffset': u'0', u'RegionName': u'Piemonte'}

This is the output of my object. I would like to access City but It's encoded. How can I read all parameters and decode it

>>> data['City']
u'Ciri\xe8'

>>>data['City'].decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe8' in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

I want plaintext not unicode string. Thank you!

Solution 1

Read this: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html

Then just print it:

>>> data = {u'City':u'Ciri\xe8'}
>>> data['City']
u'Ciri\xe8'
>>> print data['City']
Ciriè

If you don't print it, Python prints a safe representation of the string, indicating it is Unicode text u'', and that it contains a non-ASCII character \xe8. print attempts to display the non-ASCII character by encoding the Unicode string in the terminal encoding. It may fail if the string contains characters that aren't supported by the terminal encoding:

>>> print u'\xe8'
è
>>> print u'\x81'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "d:\dev\Python27\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\x81' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>

In the above example, code page 437 supports Unicode character U+00E8, but not U+0081.

Solution 2

What you want is not clear. If by 'plaintext' you mean remove accentuation, try this:

>>> s = u'Ciri\xe8'
>>> from unicodedata import normalize
>>> normalize('NFKD', s).encode('ASCII', 'ignore')
'Cirie'