print safe_str(obj) would give you some idea of the data effortlessly. Ironically this would fail if the data is an unicode string. A pythonistas would instinctively use the print command to check out the structure or content of any object. One thing that makes Python so usable is everything has a text representation, not only for scalar types but also for objects and even complex aggregated data like list of list or map of map. Use safe_unicode() to avoid the exception, so that you can collect more information for debugging.Īnother use case is a no fuss conversion for printing. If you expect unicode input but recieved a byte string instead, it might result in UnicodeError with very little information what the offending string is. When would you want to use safe_unicode() and safe_str() rather than encoding them properly? Mostly in debugging situation. It applies string_escape or unicode_escape encoding when necessary, which quote characters using Python's string escape.

Instead safe_unicode() and safe_str() can apply to either unicode or byte string. Any mistake might end up in UnicodeError. call encode() for unicode string, decode() for byte string). You also have to pay attention to the direction (i.e. Unicode_text = byte_code(encoding)īyte_string = unicode_string.encode(encoding) The proper way to convert them is to use the encode and decode method, e.g. ASCII, strict), which more often then not would result in UnicodeError. In such case Python would just apply the system encoding (e.g.

However they cannot be applied to text string or unicode string in general. Python's built in function str() and unicode() return a string representation of the object in byte string and unicode string respectively.

Python convert unicode to ascii