print python emoji as unicode string

Question

I've been trying to output

as '\U0001f604' instead of the smiley but it doesn't seem to work.

i tried using repr() but it gives me this '\xf0\x9f\x98\x84'. Currently it outputs as the smiley which is not what I wanted. encode('unicode_escape') gives me a UnicodeDecodeError.

The smiley was passed as a string to a class method in python. i.e. "I am happy

"

Appreciate if anyone could help.

Sorry for the big smiley. The markdown doesn't seem to work here.

Answer 1

>>> print u'\U0001f604'.encode('unicode-escape')
\U0001f604

Answer 2

I found the solution to the problem.

I wrote the following code:

#convert to unicode
teststring = unicode(teststring, 'utf-8')

#encode it with string escape
teststring = teststring.encode('unicode_escape')

Answer 3

Another solution is to use the short names here and print them using the string literal \N

print('\N{grinning face with smiling eyes}')

Answer 4

Just add

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

into your code and you will be able to print Unicode characters

Answer 5

If this is for debugging purposes, you could use %r as the format specifier.

>>> print '%r' % u'\U0001f604'
u'\U0001f604'

Answer 6

This code might help you to see how you can simply print an emoji:

Code

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import re

# string = 'Anything else that you wish to match, except URLs http://url.org'
string = 'Anything else that you wish to match'
matches = re.search(r'^(((?!http|https).)+)$', string)
if matches:
    print(matches.group(1)+ " is a match 😄 ")
else: 
    print('🙀 Sorry! No matches! Something is not right!')

Output for string with URL

🙀 Sorry! No matches! Something is not right!

Output for string without URL

Anything else that you wish to match is a match 😄