Showing text representation of Unicode symbol in Python 3

Question

I can do this in my ipython notebook:

print(u"\u2605")

★

But how do I go backwards? That is, going from the symbol to the unicode string. Encoding it in UTF-8 or UTF-16 is giving binary representations. For example:

print('★'.encode('utf-16'))

b'\xff\xfe\x05&'

Answer 1

You can use unicode-escape encoding:

>>> '★'.encode('unicode-escape')
b'\\u2605'
>>> print('★'.encode('unicode-escape').decode())
\u2605

or ord if you just want to know the codepoint:

>>> ord('★')
9733
>>> hex(ord('★'))  # as hexa decimal
'0x2605'
>>> print(r'\u%x' % ord('★'))
\u2605

Showing text representation of Unicode symbol in Python 3

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