title: Python treats unicode string as regular string
body: <p>I use the requests library to scrape some data from a webpage. This webpage contains special characters as unicode characters: '&gt;' as '\u003e' for example.</p>
  <p>A problem I have however is that python does not seem to treat the scraped unicode characters as unicode strings, but rather as regular strings starting with a backslash, i.e '\\u003e' instead of '\u003e'. Therefore when I try to unescape the unicode string I just get '\u003e' instead of '&gt;'.</p>
  <p>Does anyone have any idea of how to fix this?</p>