How to match a emoticon in sentence with regular expressions

Question

I'm using Python to process Weibo (a twitter-like service in China) sentences. There are some emoticons in the sentences, whose corresponding unicode are \ue317 etc. To process the sentence, I need to encode the sentence with gbk, see below:

 string1_gbk = string1.decode('utf-8').encode('gb2312')

There will be a UnicodeEncodeError:'gbk' codec can't encode character u'\ue317'

I tried \\ue[0-9a-zA-Z]{3}, but it did not work. How could I match these emoticons in sentences?

Answer 1

Try

string1_gbk = string1.decode('utf-8').encode('gb2312', 'replace')

Should output ? instead of those emoticons.

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