python - how to add unicode literal to a variable?

Given a raw byte string, you can convert it to a unicode object (Python 2.x) or a str object (Python 3.x) by decoding it:

for name in ops.listdir(somedir.decode("utf-8")):

Use whatever encoding the byte string is encoded in instead of "utf-8". If you omit the encoding, Python's standard encoding will be used (ascii in 2.x, utf-8 in 3.x).

See the Unicode HOWTO (3.x) for further information.

In case someone comes across this post like I did:

A little hack you can do is (u'%s' % somedir)

unicode(somedir)

e.g. use the builtin function

If the source of somedir doesn't provide it as a Unicode string (isinstance(somedir, unicode) is False) then you should decode it by providing an appropriate character encoding (it depends on where the bytes come from):

unicode_somedir = somedir.decode(encoding)