Unicode escapes only work in unicode strings, so this
a="\u2026"
is actually a string of 6 characters: '\', 'u', '2', '0', '2', '6'.
To make unicode out of this, use decode('unicode-escape')
:
a="\u2026"
print repr(a)
print repr(a.decode('unicode-escape'))
## '\\u2026'
## u'\u2026'