How to convert a list to unicode list

[jackvo]

Hey guys,
I need to know which is the best way to convert a list to unicode list.
Code :
nameStaff = ['Huey', 'Dewey', 'Cộng']
The 3rd element is already unicode character. So whenever I try to convert to Unicode list, got an error message below.

UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xcc in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)

I search on StackOverFlow but still not find the solution.
Solution 1 :
answer = [unicode(item) for item in x]
Solution 2 :
map(unicode,lst)

The expect result :
nameStaff = [u'Huey', u'Dewey', u'Cộng']

Could you have any idead for this issuse ?

[Luong_Quang_Manh (Lương Quang Mạnh)]

Have you tried unicode(some_str, 'utf-8')? It worked for me.

[jackvo]

Problem solved. Thank you for this solution, could you help me to explain the reason ?
Code :

#coding:utf-8
import sys, string
nameStaff = [‘Huey’, ‘Dewey’, ‘Cộng’]
nameAfter = []
print "The current default encoding Python: ", sys.getdefaultencoding()
for s in nameStaff:
nameAfter.append(unicode(s,‘utf-8’))
print nameAfter
msg = repr(nameAfter).decode(‘unicode-escape’)
print msg

Output :

The current default encoding Python: ascii
[u’Huey’, u’Dewey’, u’C\xf4\u0323ng’]
[u’Huey’, u’Dewey’, u’Cộng’]

But if I delete the first line coding:utf-8 this script has error on line 4.

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ‘\xc3’ in file E:/ex20.py on line 4, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

[Luong_Quang_Manh (Lương Quang Mạnh)]

First of all, you should wrap your code in a pair of ``` to syntax highlight it. If you show your code like that, I don’t know where a code block starts and ends. Furthermore, it looks like the first line starts with a #, which the markdown parser identifies as a header.

Edited:
# encoding: utf-8 at the first line of a python source file declares the encoding of it, which is default to ASCII. Then, without it, it wouldn’t understand what 'Cộng' means, because ASCII table doesn’t have 'ộ'.