unicode

**unicode**([object[, encoding [, errors]]])

Return the Unicode string version of object using one of the following
modes:

If _encoding_ and/or _errors_ are given, [[unicode]] will decode the
object which can either be an 8-bit string or a character buffer using
the codec for encoding. The _encoding_ parameter is a string giving the
name of an encoding; if the encoding is not known, [[LookupError]] is
raised. Error handling is done according to _errors_; this specifies the
treatment of characters which are invalid in the input encoding. If
errors is `'strict'` (the default), a [[ValueError]] is raised on errors,
while a value of `'ignore'` causes errors to be silently ignored, and
a value of `'replace'` causes the official Unicode replacement
character, `U+FFFD`, to be used to replace input characters which
cannot be decoded. See also the [codecs][28] module.

If no optional parameters are given, [[unicode]] will mimic the
behaviour of [[str]] except that it returns Unicode strings instead of
8-bit strings. More precisely, if object is a Unicode string or
subclass it will return that Unicode string without any additional
decoding applied.

For objects which provide a [[\_\_unicode\_\_]] method,
it will call this method without arguments to create a Unicode
string. For all other objects, the 8-bit string version or
representation is requested and then converted to a Unicode string
using the codec for the default encoding in <q>strict</q> mode.

New in version 2.0. Changed in version 2.2: Support for
[[\_\_unicode\_\_]] added.