Unicode Encoding/decoding

I have a string that looks like this. st = '/M\xe4rzen' I would like to covert this to unicode. How can I do this? I've tried: st.decode('utf-8') unicode(t, 'utf-8') The original

Solution 1:

Your data is not UTF8 encoded; more likely it is using the Latin-1 encoding:

>>>print st.decode('latin1')
/Märzen

Calling .decode() is enough, no need to also call unicode().