Unescaping Characters in a String with Python

Question

I made a JSON request that gives me a string that uses Unicode character codes that looks like:

s = \"\\u003Cp\\u003E\"

And I want to conve

Answer 1

>>> "\\u003Cp\\u003E".decode('unicode-escape')
u'<p>'

Answer 2

If the data came from JSON, the json module should already have decoded these escapes for you:

>>> import json
>>> json.loads('"\u003Cp\u003E"')
u'<p>'