force string to unicode

forceunicode.py

def force_unicode(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False, errors='strict'):
    """
    Similar to smart_text, except that lazy instances are resolved to
    strings, rather than kept as lazy objects.

    If strings_only is True, don't convert (some) non-string-like objects.
    """
    # Handle the common case first, saves 30-40% when s is an instance of
    # six.text_type. This function gets called often in that setting.
    if isinstance(s, six.text_type):
        return s
    if strings_only and is_protected_type(s):
        return s
    try:
        if not isinstance(s, six.string_types):
            if hasattr(s, '__unicode__'):
                s = s.__unicode__()
            else:
                if six.PY3:
                    if isinstance(s, bytes):
                        s = six.text_type(s, encoding, errors)
                    else:
                        s = six.text_type(s)
                else:
                    s = six.text_type(bytes(s), encoding, errors)
        else:
            # Note: We use .decode() here, instead of six.text_type(s,
            # encoding, errors), so that if s is a SafeBytes, it ends up being
            # a SafeText at the end.
            s = s.decode(encoding, errors)
    except UnicodeDecodeError as e:
        if not isinstance(s, Exception):
            raise UnicodeDecodeError(*e.args)
        else:
            # If we get to here, the caller has passed in an Exception
            # subclass populated with non-ASCII bytestring data without a
            # working unicode method. Try to handle this without raising a
            # further exception by individually forcing the exception args
            # to unicode.
            s = ' '.join([force_unicode(arg, encoding, strings_only,
                          errors) for arg in s])
    return s