title: Encoding troubles - one format to another
body: <p>I have a scraper that is collecting some data from elsewhere that I have no control over. The source data does all sorts of interesting Unicode characters but it converts them to a pretty unhelpful format, so </p>
  
  <pre><code>\u00e4
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>for a small 'a' with umlaut (sans the double quotes that I think are supposed to be there)*. of course this gets rendered in my HTML as plain text. </p>
  
  <p>Is there any realistic way to convert the unicode source into proper characters that doesn't involve me manually crunching out every single string sequence and replacing them during the scrape?</p>
  
  <p>*here is a sample of the json that it spits out:</p>
  
  <pre><code>({"content":{"pagelet_tab_content":"&lt;div class=\"post_user\"&gt;Latest post by &lt;span&gt;D\u00e4vid&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;\n})
  </code></pre>