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Convert unicode base notation to string in python

I have a data in form of 2\u2070iPSC.
which is actually 2⁰iPSC. how do i convert 2\u2070iPSC to 2⁰iPSC using python.

As a unicode string the data already is 2⁰iPSC. I think that you are concerned about its display.
The code point \u2070 is ⁰:
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name(u'\u2070')
'SUPERSCRIPT ZERO'
If you are using Python 2 you need to prefix the string with u to indicate that the unicode escape sequences are to be interpreted:
>>> type('2\u2070iPSC')
<type 'str'>
>>> type(u'2\u2070iPSC') # note `u` prefix
<type 'unicode'>
In Python 3 strings are unicode by default, so the u prefix is not required:
>>> type('2\u2070iPSC')
<class 'str'>
To display the string you can simply print it:
>>> print(u'2\u2070iPSC')
2⁰iPSC
This works if the default encoding of your interpreter can represent u'\u2070', e.g. UTF-8.

You need to add u as prefix in order to set it as unicode string.
unicode_string = u'2\u2070iPSC'
print(unicode_string)
>> 2⁰iPSC

String and hexadecimal representation

I'm trying the following:
>>> a = '\01'
>>> a
>>> '\x01'
>>> b = '\11'
>>> b
>>> '\t'
>>> c = '\21'
>>> c
>>> '\x11'
I don't understand why sometimes I get hexadecimal representation and other times not.
In '\xhh' the 'x' is fundamental or not?

Short Answer
You see the hexadecimal representation for those characters for which your native code page cannot represent your characters
Long Answer
Assuming you are using windows, and your default code page is cp1252, '\01' is a non-printable character, an ascii control code, which stands for Start of Heading. As there is no known printable representation of the character, a hexadecimal value is used to display the value.

The numbers \11, \21 are OCTAL numbers. \11 octal is \x09 (hex) is equal to '\t' (tab char). \21 octal is \x11 hex is 17 decimal.

How to convert string to bytes in Python 2

I know this may sounds like a duplicate question, but that's because I don't know how to describe this question properly.
For some reason I got a bunch of unicode string like this:
a = u'\xcb\xea'
As you can see, it's actually bytes representation of a Chinese character, encoding in gbk
>>> print(b'\xcb\xea'.decode('gbk'))
岁
u'岁' is what I need, but I don't know how to convert u'\xcb\xea' to b'\xcb\xea'.
Any suggestions?

It's not really a bytes representation, it's still unicode codepoints. They are the wrong codepoints, because it was decoded from bytes as if it was encoded to Latin-1.
Encode to Latin 1 (whose codepoints map one-on-one to bytes), then decode as GBK:
a.encode('latin1').decode('gbk')
Demo:
>>> a = u'\xcb\xea'
>>> a.encode('latin1').decode('gbk')
u'\u5c81'
>>> print a.encode('latin1').decode('gbk')
岁

The simpliest way for python2 is to use the repr():
>>> key_unicode = u'uuuu\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1'
>>> key_ascii = 'uuuu\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1'
>>> print(key_ascii)
uuuu��_��9ԣ�
>>> print(key_unicode)
uuuuö_¡ë9Ô£Ñ
>>>
>>> # here is the save method for both string types:
>>> print(repr(key_ascii).lstrip('u')[1:-1])
uuuu\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1
>>> print(repr(key_unicode).lstrip('u')[1:-1])
uuuu\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1
>>> # ____________WARNING!______________
>>> # if you will use jsut `str.strip('u\'\"')`, you will lose
>>> # the "uuuu" (and quotes, if such are present) on sides of the string:
>>> print(repr(key_unicode).strip('u\'\"'))
\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1
For python3 use str.encode() to get the bytes type.
>>> key = 'l\xf6\x9f_\xa1\x05\xeb9\xd4\xa3\xd1q\xf5L\xa9\xdd0\x90\x8b\xf5ht\x86za\x0e\x1b\xed\xb6(\xaa+'
>>> key
'lö\x9f_¡\x05ë9Ô£ÑqõL©Ý0\x90\x8bõht\x86za\x0e\x1bí¶(ª+'
>>> print(key)
lö_¡ë9Ô£ÑqõL©Ý0õhtzaí¶(ª+
>>> print(repr(key.encode()).lstrip('b')[1:-1])
l\xc3\xb6\xc2\x9f_\xc2\xa1\x05\xc3\xab9\xc3\x94\xc2\xa3\xc3\x91

Python get character code in different encoding?

Given a character code as integer number in one encoding, how can you get the character code in, say, utf-8 and again as integer?

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, so I'll assume you really meant "Unicode code point". Use chr() to convert the character code to a character, decode it, and use ord() to get the code point.
>>> ord(chr(145).decode('koi8-r'))
9618

You can only map an "integer number" from one encoding to another if they are both single-byte encodings.
Here's an example using "iso-8859-15" and "cp1252" (aka "ANSI"):
>>> s = u'€'
>>> s.encode('iso-8859-15')
'\xa4'
>>> s.encode('cp1252')
'\x80'
>>> ord(s.encode('cp1252'))
128
>>> ord(s.encode('iso-8859-15'))
164
Note that ord is here being used to get the ordinal number of the encoded byte. Using ord on the original unicode string would give its unicode code point:
>>> ord(s)
8364
The reverse operation to ord can be done using either chr (for codes in the range 0 to 127) or unichr (for codes in the range 0 to sys.maxunicode):
>>> print chr(65)
A
>>> print unichr(8364)
€
For multi-byte encodings, a simple "integer number" mapping is usually not possible.
Here's the same example as above, but using "iso-8859-15" and "utf-8":
>>> s = u'€'
>>> s.encode('iso-8859-15')
'\xa4'
>>> s.encode('utf-8')
'\xe2\x82\xac'
>>> [ord(c) for c in s.encode('iso-8859-15')]
[164]
>>> [ord(c) for c in s.encode('utf-8')]
[226, 130, 172]
The "utf-8" encoding uses three bytes to encode the same character, so a one-to-one mapping is not possible. Having said that, many encodings (including "utf-8") are designed to be ASCII-compatible, so a mapping is usually possible for codes in the range 0-127 (but only trivially so, because the code will always be the same).

Here's an example of how the encode/decode dance works:
>>> s = b'd\x06' # perhaps start with bytes encoded in utf-16
>>> map(ord, s) # show those bytes as integers
[100, 6]
>>> u = s.decode('utf-16') # turn the bytes into unicode
>>> print u # show what the character looks like
٤
>>> print ord(u) # show the unicode code point as an integer
1636
>>> t = u.encode('utf-8') # turn the unicode into bytes with a different encoding
>>> map(ord, t) # show that encoding as integers
[217, 164]
Hope this helps :-)
If you need to construct the unicode directly from an integer, use unichr:
>>> u = unichr(1636)
>>> print u
٤

python - problems with regular expression and unicode

Hi I have a problem in python. I try to explain my problem with an example.
I have this string:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'
>>> print string
ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ
and i want, for example, replace charachters different from Ñ,Ã,ï with ""
i have tried:
>>> rePat = re.compile('[^ÑÃï]',re.UNICODE)
>>> print rePat.sub("",string)
�Ñ�����������������������������ï�������������������Ã
I obtained this �.
I think that it's happen because this type of characters in python are represented by two position in the vector: for example \xc3\x91 = Ñ.
For this, when i make the regolar expression, all the \xc3 are not substitued. How I can do this type of sub?????
Thanks
Franco

You need to make sure that your strings are unicode strings, not plain strings (plain strings are like byte arrays).
Example:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'
>>> type(string)
<type 'str'>
# do this instead:
# (note the u in front of the ', this marks the character sequence as a unicode literal)
>>> string = u'\xd0\xd1\xd2\xd3\xd4\xd5\xd6\xd7\xd8\xd9\xda\xdb\xdc\xdd\xde\xdf\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4\xe5\xe6\xe7\xe8\xe9\xea\xeb\xec\xed\xee\xef\xf0\xf1\xf2\xf3\xf4\xf5\xf6\xf7\xf8\xf9\xfa\xfb\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff\xc0\xc1\xc2\xc3'
# or:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'.decode('utf-8')
# ... but be aware that the latter will only work if the terminal (or source file) has utf-8 encoding
# ... it is a best practice to use the \xNN form in unicode literals, as in the first example
>>> type(string)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> print string
ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ
>>> rePat = re.compile(u'[^\xc3\x91\xc3\x83\xc3\xaf]',re.UNICODE)
>>> print rePat.sub("", string)
Ã
When reading from a file, string = open('filename.txt').read() reads a byte sequence.
To get the unicode content, do: string = unicode(open('filename.txt').read(), 'encoding'). Or: string = open('filename.txt').read().decode('encoding').
The codecs module can decode unicode streams (such as files) on-the-fly.
Do a google search for python unicode. Python unicode handling can be a bit hard to grasp at first, it pays to read up on it.
I live by this rule: "Software should only work with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output." (from http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode)
I also recommend: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html