I get the following string from database:
'23:45 \xe2\x80\x93 23:59' and the output should look like
'23:45 - 23:59' How can I decode this? I tried utf-8 decoding but no luck
>>> x.decode("utf-8") u'23:45 \u2013 23:59' Thank you
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3 Answers
This is completely correct. The interactive python interpreter displaye the repr() of the string. If you want to see it as a proper string, print it:
>>> print '23:45 \xe2\x80\x93 23:59' 23:45 – 23:59 
3 Comments
daydreamer
Hi ThiefMaster, but how do I get '-' instead of \u2013? is the only option is to user re package?
glglgl
The same way: with
print u'23:45 \u2013 23:59', you get as well the output 23:45 – 23:59.daydreamer
I want to put this in the variable and when I do x = x.decode("utf-8"), I see in output 'quarter_hour': '23:45 \xe2\x80\x93 23:59' and not 'quarter_hour': '23:45 - 23:59'
The UTF-8 representation of an "en dash" http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2013/index.htm is hex 0xE2 0x80 0x93 (e28093), or u"\u2013". It sounds like you want to replace the en-dash character with an ascii hyphen/minus (0x2d) to store it in the variable. That's OK, but the variable won't contain the same character that is stored in the database, any more than if you replaced a Ü ( http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/dc/index.htm ) with an ascii U, or replaced a zero (0x30) with a capital O (0x4f).
1 Comment
Dave
See also stackoverflow.com/questions/816285/…, the last answer of which says: "Unidecode looks like a complete solution. It converts fancy quotes to ascii quotes, accented latin characters to unaccented and even attempts transliteration to deal with characters that don't have ASCII equivalents."
a="NOV–DEC 2011" (en-dash) b=unidecode(a) #output --> NOV-DEC 2011 (with hyphen) You need to install unidecode first, and import it. I've tried it and it runs well. Hope it helps!
