Cool, it works! I have also done some due diligence that the utf-8 encoding would not introduce any Python escape accidentially. I have written a recipe in the Python cookbook:
Efficient character escapes decoding http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/466293 wy > Does this do what you want? > > >>> u'€\\n€' > u'\x80\\n\x80' > >>> len(u'€\\n€') > 4 > >>> u'€\\n€'.encode('utf-8').decode('string_escape').decode('utf-8') > u'\x80\n\x80' > >>> > len(u'€\\n€'.encode('utf-8').decode('string_escape').decode('utf-8')) > 3 > > Basically, I convert the unicode string to bytes, escape the bytes using > the 'string_escape' codec, and then convert the bytes back into a > unicode string. > > HTH, > > STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list