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pythonunicode

Change unicode to actual character?

I have this string \\u2605 which codes for ★, and I want to change it so that:

  1. It prints either ★ or the "?" command prompt replacement, rather than \\u2605

  2. I can send the string into functions as ★ not \\u2605

How do I change/encode the string?

Solution

  • You can pass the bytes to decode('unicode-escape'):

    s = '\\u2605 Amazing \\u2605'

s = bytes(s, 'utf8').decode( 'unicode-escape' )

print(s)
# ★ Amazing ★

    note: not sure if this is a problem in your case, but decode( 'unicode-escape' ) does not handle un-escaped, non-ascii, so something like s = '\\u2605 Ama ★ zing \\u2605' would cause problems. See issue here. A possible solution in this case is to escape the entire string and then decode:

    s = s.encode('ascii','backslashreplace').decode( 'unicode-escape' )