string to unicode

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/15/2011 11:29 AM, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-08-15 at 08:20 -0700, Artie Ziff wrote:
>> if I am using the standard csv library to read contents of a csv file
>> which contains Unicode strings (short example:
>> '\xe8\x9f\x92\xe8\x9b\x87'), how do I use a python Unicode method such
>> as decode or encode to transform this string type into a python unicode
>> type? Must I know the encoding (byte groupings) of the Unicode? Can I
>> get this from the file? Perhaps I need to open the file with particular
>> attributes?
>
> Open the file with a codec and pass that file-like object to csv.
>
> codecs.open(filename, mode[, encoding[, errors[, buffering]]])
>
> <http://docs.python.org/library/codecs.html#codec-objects>

In Python 3, just open with open(... encoding = 'xxx')


-- 
Terry Jan Reedy