title: Python 3 - decode escaped string
body: <p>I am working on simple python script. Unluckily some data I must work with, are stored as follows:</p>
  
  <h2>My data</h2>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>trouble_string = '{\"N\": \"Centr\\u00e1lna nervov\\u00e1 s\\u00fastava\"}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <h2>What I want to achieve</h2>
  
  <p>I want to convert string in following format.</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>decoded_string = '{"N": "Centrálna nervová sústava"}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <h2>Problem</h2>
  
  <p>You can see there are accented letters numerically encoded. Is there any smart way how to decode this string?</p>
  
  <h2>What I tried</h2>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>bytes(s, encoding='utf-8').decode(encoding='utf-16')
  # outputs: '䌢湥牴畜〰ㅥ湬\u2061敮癲癯畜〰ㅥ猠畜〰慦瑳癡≡'
  
  bytes(s, encoding='utf-16').decode(encoding='utf-8')
  # outputs: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: invalid start byte
  </code></pre>