<type 'unicode'>

[Peter Hansen]

Billy Ng wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I notice the node.getAttribute() returns the unicode type string.  How can I
> cast it to string type?

>>> u = u'string'
>>> dir(u)
[..., 'count', 'encode', 'endswith', ... ]
>>> u.encode('iso-8859-1')
'string'
>>> u.encode('latin-1')
'string'
>>> u.encode('utf-8')
'string'
>>> 'string'.decode('utf-8')
u'string'

The specific encoding you use is up to you.  If the attribute contains
only ASCII characters (ordinal value less than 128), any of the above 
should do.

-Peter