Unicode question : turn "José" into u"José"

[Ian Sparks]

This is probably stupid and/or misguided but supposing I'm passed a byte-string value that I want to be unicode, this is what I do. I'm sure I'm missing something very important.

Short version :

>>> s = "José" #Start with non-unicode string
>>> unicoded = eval("u'%s'" % "José")

Long version :

>>> s = "José" #Start with non-unicode string
>>> s          #Lets look at it
'Jos\xe9'
>>> escaped = s.encode('string_escape')  
>>> escaped
'Jos\\xe9'
>>> unicoded = eval("u'%s'" % escaped)
>>> unicoded
u'Jos\xe9'

>>> test = u"José"   #What they should have passed me
>>> test == unicoded #Am I really getting the same thing?
True                 #Yay!