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 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 😄"

Answer 1

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')