how do i convert all those escape characters into their respective characters like if there is an unicode à, how do i convert that into a standard a?
Assume you have loaded your unicode into a variable called my_unicode
... normalizing à into a is this simple...
import unicodedata
output = unicodedata.normalize('NFD', my_unicode).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
Explicit example...
>>> myfoo = u'àà'
>>> myfoo
u'\xe0\xe0'
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFD', myfoo).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'aa'
>>>
How it works
unicodedata.normalize('NFD', "insert-unicode-text-here")
performs a Canonical Decomposition (NFD) of the unicode text; then we use str.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
to transform the NFD mapped characters into ascii (ignoring errors).