How to get ° character in a string in python?

Question

How can I get a ° (degree) character into a string?

Answer 1

This is the most coder-friendly version of specifying a unicode character:

degree_sign= u'\N{DEGREE SIGN}'

Note: must be a capital N in the \N construct to avoid confusion with the '\n' newline character. The character name inside the curly braces can be any case.

It's easier to remember the name of a character than its unicode index. It's also more readable, ergo debugging-friendly. The character substitution happens at compile time: the .py[co] file will contain a constant for u'°':

>>> import dis
>>> c= compile('u"\N{DEGREE SIGN}"', '', 'eval')
>>> dis.dis(c)
  1           0 LOAD_CONST               0 (u'\xb0')
              3 RETURN_VALUE
>>> c.co_consts
(u'\xb0',)
>>> c= compile('u"\N{DEGREE SIGN}-\N{EMPTY SET}"', '', 'eval')
>>> c.co_consts
(u'\xb0-\u2205',)
>>> print c.co_consts[0]
°-∅