How to 'de-slashify' a string?

[AK]

Hi, if I have a string '\\303\\266', how can I convert it to '\303\266' 
in a general way?

The problem I'm running into is that I'm connecting with pygresql to a 
postgres database and when I get fields that are of 'char' type, I get 
them in unicode, but when I get fields of 'byte' type, I get the text 
with quoted slashes, e.g. '\303' becomes '\\303' and so on.

I saw posts online to do

cursor.execute("set client-encoding to unicode")

before running queries but this command causes an error.

So I think I need a way to de-quote the slashes or alternatively
some way to tell pygresql not to quote slashes for 'byte' fields.

Any help, hints, etc appreciated..

-- 
AK