title: Comparing unicode representations to symbols
body: <p>I have a datafile containing a large number of sentences, encoded like this:</p>
  
  <p>"Gib mir bitte Erk\u00e4ltung"</p>
  
  <p>I also have a datafile containing a large number of keywords, encoded like this:</p>
  
  <p>"Erkältung"</p>
  
  <p>I would like to search for keywords in sentences and then write them out to a file, in the "Erkältung" format.</p>
  
  <p>How would I convert \u00e4 to ä without having to do:</p>
  
  <p>String.replace('\u00e4', 'ä')</p>
  
  <p>More exactly, I would like to have this return a match in Python 2.6:</p>
  
  <p>(#coding: utf-8)</p>
  
  <pre><code>sentence = "Gib mir bitte Erk\u00e4ltung"
  
  keyword = "Erkältung"
  
  re.search(keyword, line)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any hints?</p>