Debug print Unicode string with \U notation

Question

I have a dictionary containing strings with Unicode characters:

d = {'middle': "middle is:\U0001f004."}

For debugging purposes, I'd like to print d and get output with the same notation:

print(d)
{'middle': "middle is:\U0001f004."}

How do I do that?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 04 '18 at 17:39

4

Python 3 has the ascii function for this purpose. Any character outside the ASCII character set is displayed as an escape code:

>>> d = {'middle': "middle is:\U0001f004."}
>>> d
{'middle': 'middle is:.'}
>>> print(ascii(d))
{'middle': 'middle is:\U0001f004.'}

answered Dec 04 '18 at 17:39

Mark Tolonen

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This is a simple and accurate solution. – XPlatformer Dec 05 '18 at 19:23
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I like how this question was answered by a user who has a gold batch in both Python and Unicode, and who has a profile picture, which is his own name encoded in ASCII :-D – XPlatformer Dec 06 '18 at 11:14
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@XPlatformer you’re the first person to comment on my profile picture. – Mark Tolonen Dec 06 '18 at 14:37

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 04 '18 at 15:17

You can encode the string representation of the dictionary and encode it using unicode_escape. This will return a bytes object that you will want to decode again to get a string.

d = {'middle': 'middle is:\U0001f004.'}
print(str(d).encode('unicode_escape').decode())

Outputs:

{'middle': 'middle is:\U0001f004.'}

This should work for a wide range of situations but, generally speaking, making sure that the printed string matches the code used to create any data structure is not possible.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 04 '18 at 14:25

0

When outputing the string, encode it with unicode_escape, like this: string.encode('unicode_escape').

answered Dec 04 '18 at 14:25

jxpp

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`d` is a dict. A dict does not have an `encode` method. – XPlatformer Dec 04 '18 at 14:29
Correct, you can only call it on the string. You can use a dict comprehension to call it on every key-value pair in the dict: `{k: v.encode('unicode_escape') for k, v in d.items()}`. – jxpp Dec 04 '18 at 14:33
this won't work for a list then. Or a dict of dicts. I need something more generic. Debugging stuff with unicode strings in. – XPlatformer Dec 04 '18 at 14:35
...then I get `b"{'middle': 'middle is:\\U0001f004.'}"`. What I asked for was `{'middle': 'middle is:\U0001f004.'}`. Still some way to go... All I need is an easy way to debug-print some variables in my code. – XPlatformer Dec 04 '18 at 14:55
At last we know you are using Python3! – Stop harming Monica Dec 04 '18 at 15:12

Debug print Unicode string with \U notation

3 Answers3