two useful python function to switch between str and unicode

Python 2 unicode converters (deprecated)

def to_str(text):
    '''
    convert unicode to string
    '''
    try:
        return str(text)
    except:
        return str(text.encode("utf-8"))

def to_unicode(text):
    '''
    convert string to unicode
    '''
    try:
        return unicode(text.decode("utf-8"))
    except:
        return unicode(text)