UTF-8 characters in python string even after decoding from UTF-8?

Tamoor Hamid 0
Viewed 56

I'm working on converting portions of XHTML to JSON objects. I finally got everything in JSON form, but some UTF-8 character codes are being printed. Example:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I\u2019m not on Earth."
  }
}

This should be:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I'm not on Earth."
  }
}

This is just one example of UTF-8 codes coming through. How can I got through the string and replace every instance of a UTF-8 code with the character it represents?

utf-8 beautifulsoup json python
2 Answers

\u2019 is not a UTF-8 character, but a Unicode escape code. It's valid JSON and when read back via json.load will become ’ (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK).

If you want to write the actual character, use ensure_ascii=False to prevent escape codes from being written for non-ASCII characters:

with open('output.json','w',encoding='utf8') as f:
    json.dump(data, f, ensure_ascii=False, indent=2)
Mark Tolonen0

You didn'y paste your code, so I don't kwon how you convert XHTML to JSON. I assumed, that you ended with hex value characters in python objects. This \u2019 is a one character with 16-bit hex value. Json module can handle this by default for example loads method can fix that:

x = '''{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I\\u2019m not on Earth."
  }
}'''

print(x)
x_json=json.loads(x)
print(x_json)

Output shows:

{
  "p": {
    "@class": "para-p",
    "#text": "I\u2019m not on Earth."
  }
}

{'p': {'@class': 'para-p', '#text': 'I’m not on Earth.'}}
RobertG0
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