[FIXED] UnicodeDecodeError: ('unknown', u'\xe0', 0, 1, '')

Issue

temp = "à la Carte"
print type(temp)
utemp = unicode(temp)

The code above results in an error. My goal is to process the temp string and use a find to check if it contains specific string in it but cannot process due to the error:

UnicodeDecodeError: ('unknown', u'\xe0', 0, 1, '')

Solution

You need to specify the encoding: otherwise unicode() doesn't know what \xe0 means, because that is encoding-specific.

>>> temp = "à la Carte"
>>> utemp = unicode(temp,encoding="Windows-1252")
>>> utemp
u'\xe0 la Carte'
>>> print utemp
à la Carte

Answered By - BoarGules