Convert Python escaped Unicode sequences to UTF-8

Question

I'm using Beautiful Soup. It gets me the text of some HTML nodes, but those nodes have some Unicode characters, which get converted to escaped sequences in the string

For example, An HTML element that has this: 50 € is retrieved by Beautiful Soup like: soup.find("h2").text as this string: 50\u20ac, which is only readable in the Python console. But then it becomes unreadable when written to a JSON file. Note: I save to a JSON file using this code:

with open('file.json', 'w') as fp:
        json.dump(fileToSave, fp)

How can I convert those Unicode characters back to UTF-8 or whatever makes them readable again?

Answer 1

Small demo using Python 3. If you don't dump to JSON using ensure_ascii=False, non-ASCII will be written to JSON with Unicode escape codes. That doesn't affect the ability to load the JSON, but it is less readable in the .json file itself.

Python 3.6.1 (v3.6.1:69c0db5, Mar 21 2017, 18:41:36) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> html = '<element>50\u20ac</element'
>>> html
'<element>50€</element'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html,'html')
>>> soup.find('element').text
'50€'
>>> import json
>>> with open('out.json','w',encoding='utf8') as f:
...  json.dump(soup.find('element').text,f,ensure_ascii=False)
...
>>> ^Z

Content of out.json (UTF-8-encoded):

"50€"