How to encode Python 3 string using \u escape code?

Question

In Python 3, suppose I have

>>> thai_string = 'สีเ'

Using encode gives

>>> thai_string.encode('utf-8')
b'\xe0\xb8\xaa\xe0\xb8\xb5'

My question: how can I get encode() to return a bytes sequence using \u instead of \x? And how can I decode them back to a Python 3 str type?

I tried using the ascii builtin, which gives

>>> ascii(thai_string)
"'\\u0e2a\\u0e35'"

But this doesn't seem quite right, as I can't decode it back to obtain thai_string.

Python documentation tells me that

• \xhh escapes the character with the hex value hh while
• \uxxxx escapes the character with the 16-bit hex value xxxx

The documentation says that \u is only used in string literals, but I'm not sure what that means. Is this a hint that my question has a flawed premise?

Answer 1

You can use unicode_escape:

>>> thai_string.encode('unicode_escape')
b'\\u0e2a\\u0e35\\u0e40'

Note that encode() will always return a byte string (bytes) and the unicode_escape encoding is intended to:

Produce a string that is suitable as Unicode literal in Python source code