[FIXED] utf-8 encoding and greek characters

Issue

While I managed to get all the data that I need as well as save it on a cv file, the output I get is in UTF-8 format, which is normal(correct me If I'm wrong)

TBH I've already "played" with the .encode() and .decode() option without any results.

here is my code

brands=[name.text for name in Unibrands]

here is the output

u'Spirulina \u0395\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7\u03bd\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae'

And this is the desired output

u'Spirulina Ελληνική'

Solution

That string is already fine; you're seeing the repr of it, which does escape certain characters because this is intended to be safe to copy and paste directly into Python source code (which in Python 2.x means it needs to have only printable ASCII characters) - eg, \u0395 represents the codepoint U+0395 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON. You're seeing this form of it because printing a list (or other container) always shows you the repr of its contents - if you instead print the string directly, you should see an appropriate glyph instead of the escaped form:

>>> print(u'Spirulina \u0395\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7\u03bd\u03b9\u03ba\u03ae')
>>> 'Spirulina Ελληνική'

You could also consider upgrading to a newer Python version; Python 3.5 (and possibly earlier 3.x versions) no longer escape these letters in the repr, since Python now accepts Unicode characters in source files by default.

Answered By - lvc