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 convert it to:

s = "<p>"

What's the best way to do this in Python?

Note, this is the same question as this one, only in Python except Ruby. I am also using the Posterous API.

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>'