How to interpret Unicode notation in Python? - python-2.7

Question

How to convert formal Unicode notation like 'U+1F600' into something like this: '\U0001F600', which I saw represented as 'Python Src' at websites online?
My end-goal is to use Unicode for emojis in Python(2.x) and I am able to achieve it in this way:
unicode_string = '\U0001F600'
unicode_string.decode('unicode-escape')
I would appreciate if you could mention the different character sets involved in the above problem.

Answer 1

The simplest way to do it is to just treat the notation as a string:
>>> s = 'U+1F600'
>>> s[2:] # chop off the U+
'1F600'
>>> s[2:].rjust(8, '0') # pad it to 8 characters with 0s
'0001F600'
>>> r'\U' + s[2:].rjust(8, '0') # prepend the `\U`
'\\U0001F600'
It might be a bit cleaner to parse the string as hex and then format the resulting number back out:
>>> int(s[2:], 16)
128512
>>> n = int(s[2:], 16)
>>> rf'\U{n:08X}'
'\\U0001F600'
… but I'm not sure it's really any easier to understand that way.
If you need to extract these from a larger string, you probably want a regular expression.
We want to match a literal U+ followed by 1 to 8 hex digits, right? So, that's U\+[0-9a-fA-F]{1,8}. Except we really don't need to include the U+ just to pull it off with [2:], so let's group the rest of it: U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8}).
>>> s = 'Hello U+1F600 world'
>>> re.search(r'U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8})', s)
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(6, 13), match='U+1F600'>
>>> re.search(r'U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8})', s).group(1)
'1F600'
Now, we can use re.sub with a function to apply the \U prepending and rjust padding:
>>> re.sub(r'U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8})', lambda match: r'\U' + match.group(1).rjust(8, '0'), s)
'Hello \\U0001F600 world'
That's probably more readable if you define the function out-of-line:
>>> def padunimatch(match):
... return r'\U' + match.group(1).rjust(8, '0')
>>> re.sub(r'U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8})', padunimatch, s)
'Hello \\U0001F600 world'
Or, if you prefer to do it numerically:
>>> def padunimatch(match):
... n = int(match.group(1), 16)
... return rf'\U{n:08X}'
>>> re.sub(r'U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{1,8})', padunimatch, s)
'Hello \\U0001F600 world'
And of course you already know how to do the last part, because it's in your question, right? Well, not quite: you can't call decode on a string, only on a bytes. The simplest way around this is to use the codec directly:
>>> x = 'Hello \\U0001F600 world'
>>> codecs.decode(x, 'unicode_escape')
'Hello 😀 world'
… unless you're using Python 2. In that case, the str type isn't a Unicode string, it's a byte-string, so decode actually works fine. But in Python 2, you'll run into other problems, unless all of your text is pure ASCII (with any non-ASCII characters encoded as U+xxxx sequences).
For example, let's say your input was:
>>> s = 'Hej U+1F600 världen'
In Python 3, that's fine. That s is a Unicode string. Under the covers, my console is sending Python UTF-8-encoded bytes to standard input and expecting to get UTF-8-encoded bytes back from standard output, but that just works like magic. (Well, not quite magic—you can print(sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding) to see that Python knows my console is UTF-8 and uses that to decode and encode on my behalf.)
In Python 2, it's not. If my console is UTF-8, what I've actually done is equivalent to:
>>> s = 'Hej U+1F600 v\xc3\xa4rlden'
… and if I try to decode that as unicode-escape, Python 2 will treat those \xc3 and \xa4 bytes as Latin-1 bytes, rather than UTF-8:
>>> s = 'Hej \U0001F600 v\xc3\xa4rlden'
… so what you end up with is:
>>> s.decode('unicode_escape')
u'Hej \U0001f600 v\xc3\xa4rlden'
>>> print(s.decode('unicode_escape'))
Hej 😀 världen
But what if you try to decode it as UTF-8 first, and then decode that as unicode_escape?
>>> s.decode('utf-8')
u'Hej \\U0001F600 v\xe4rlden'
>>> print(s.decode('utf-8'))
Hej \U0001F600 världen
>>> s.decode('utf-8').decode('unicode-escape')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 16: ordinal not in range(128)
Unlike Python 3, which just won't let you call decode on a Unicode string, Python 2 lets you do it—but it handles it by trying to encode to ASCII first, so it has something to decode, and that obviously fails here.
And you can't just use the codec directly, the way you can in Python 3:
>>> codecs.decode(s.decode('utf-8'), 'unicode_escape')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 16: ordinal not in range(128)
You could decode the UTF-8, then unicode-escape the result, then un-unicode-escape everything, but even that isn't quite right:
>>> print(s.decode('utf-8').encode('unicode_escape').decode('unicode_escape'))
Hej \U0001F600 världen
Why? Because unicode-escape, while fixing our existing Unicode character, also escaped our backslash!
If you know you definitely have no \U escapes in the original source that you didn't want parsed, there's a quick fix for this: just replace the escaped backslash:
>>> print(s.decode('utf-8').encode('unicode_escape').replace(r'\\U', r'\U').decode('unicode_escape'))
Hej 😀 världen
If this all seems like a huge pain… well, yeah, that's why Python 3 exists, because dealing with Unicode properly in Python 2 (and notice that I didn't even really deal with it properly…) is a huge pain.