Python: encoding/decoding a string starting with \x

If a string starts with \x (e.g., '\xea \xe1\xeb\xe8\xe6\xed\xe5\xec\xf3' for cyrillic) decode it using 'string_escape' :

string=string.decode('string_escape')

django:makemessages encoding problem

Tried to execute
 django-admin.py makemessages -l ru

Got error:
Error: errors happened while running xgettext on mogrify.py
xgettext: ./build/psycopg2/examples/mogrify.py:2: Unknown encoding "utf8". Proceeding with ASCII instead.
xgettext: Non-ASCII string at ./build/psycopg2/examples/mogrify.py:37.
          Please specify the source encoding through --from-code or through a comment
          as specified in http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html.

Reason and solution:
xgettext doesn't accept 'utf8', it accepts only 'utf-8'. The same with 'latin-1', it should be replaced with 'ISO-8859-1'.

So, the solution: you should check all your files inside your project or application directory if there are 'utf8' (or 'latin-1') and replace them with 'utf-8'('ISO-8859-1').

Java: setting file encoding

Input: UTF8 file (cyrillic)

File file = new File("file_utf8");
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
try
{
FileInputStream fin=null;
try {
fin = new FileInputStream(file);
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fin,"UTF8");

BufferedReader in= new BufferedReader(isr);
int ch;
while ((ch = in.read()) > -1) {
buffer.append((char)ch);
}
isr.close();
fin.close();
String[] lines=buffer.toString().split("\n");
for (String line : lines)
System.out.println(line);
}
catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

Change file encoding in linux

1. Get encoding:

file -bi test.txt
text/plain; charset=us-ascii

2. Change it:

iconv -f ascii -t utf8 [filename] > [newfilename]