> > > > 'K\xc3\xb6ni'.decode('utf-8') # 'K\xc3\xb6ni' should be 'König', > > "Köni", to be precise.
Äh, yes. ;o) > > contains a german 'umlaut' > > > > but failed since python assumes every string to decode to be ASCII? > > that should work, and it sure works for me: > > >>> s = 'K\xc3\xb6ni'.decode('utf-8') > >>> s > u'K\xf6ni' > >>> print s > Köni > > what did you do, and how did it fail? First, thank you so much for answering so fast. I proposed python for a project and it would be very embarrassing for me if I would fail converting a UTF-8 string to latin-1. I realized that my problem ist not the decode to UTF-8. The exception is raised by print if I try to print the unicode string. UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf6' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) But that is not a problem at all since I can now turn my UTF-8 strings to unicode! Once again the problem was sitting right in front of my screen. Silly me... ;o) Again, thank you for your reply! Best regards, Noel -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list