[Python-Dev] unicode/string asymmetries

[Thomas Heller]

> > How can I do the equivalent of
> >   u"some string"
> > in terms of
> >   unicode("some string", encoding)
>
> Again, what do you need that for? If there won't be any escape
> sequences or non-ASCII characters inside, then
>
>    unicode("some string", "ascii")
>
> will work fine. In the general case,
>
>    unicode("some string", "unicode-escape")
>
> should work.

In the case of pure ASCII, unicode("some string") also works.

Here's what I'm trying to do:
I have a string variable containing some non-ascii characters (from
a characterset which was previously called 'ansi' instead of 'oem'
on windows).
For example the copyright symbol "=A9" (repr("=A9") gives "\xa9").
Now I want to convert this string to unicode.
u"=A9" works fine, unicode(variable) gives an ASCII decoding error.

Thomas