How to transform a string into a Unicode character

Question

I would like to create a pretty simple code to get multiple string inputs and show as Unicode characters, let's say for example:

2119 01b4 2602 210c 00f8 1f24 (This should show 'Python' with some symbols)

But I keep getting the following exception:

SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-1: truncated \uXXXX escape

I'm trying to use '\u' to keep it simple, but if there's no other way to do this, I wouldn't bother.

My code:

while True:
    string = input()
    print(f'\u{string}', end='')

I searched and found something in Swift which is exactly what I want to do in Python, but I didn't quite understand that: Print unicode character from variable (swift).

`'\u0000'` is part of Python's literal syntax. You can't use substitutions to create syntax any more than you could run, say, `value = ''' ' + str(something) + ' '''`, and then expect `f'{value}'` to call `str(something)`; if it _did_ work, it would imply serious security bugs. — Charles Duffy, Nov 30 '20 at 18:20

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 30 '20 at 18:26

Assuming that you don't really care about whether the \u syntax is used, this would look like:

while True:
    string = input()
    print(chr(int(string, 16)), end='')

If you do in fact care for some reason:

while True:
    string = input()
    print((br'\u' + string.encode('utf-8')).decode('unicode_escape'), end='')

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 30 '20 at 18:59

The problem is that the unicode escape takes precedence over the f-string format specification. It sees "\u{str" as a 4 character escape sequence. You can split this in to two steps: create the escape and then decode. Since unicode characters can exceed 4 bytes, you may as well go large.

>>> import codecs
>>> string = "2119 01b4 2602 210c 00f8 1f24"
>>> for s in string.split(" "):
...     print(codecs.decode(rf"\U{s.zfill(8)}", "unicode-escape"), end="")
... 
ℙƴ☂ℌøἤ

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 01 '20 at 00:21

You can't directly construct \uxxxx escape sequences since that is a language construct, but it is more straightforward to use chr to convert Unicode ordinals to characters. Also int(s,16) will convert a hexadecimal string to an integer:

>>> print(''.join(chr(int(x,16)) for x in input().split()))
2119 01b4 2602 210c 00f8 1f24
ℙƴ☂ℌøἤ

How to transform a string into a Unicode character

3 Answers3