CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringunicodeformat
Kit
Kit

Reputation: 31513

How do I use string formatting with explicit character escape codes in Python?

I know that I can print the following:

print u'\u2550'

How do I do that with the .format string method? For example:

for i in range(0x2550, 0x257F):
    s = u'\u{04X}'.format(i) # of course this is a syntax error

Upvotes: 0

Views: 314

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1122372

You are looking for the unichr() function:

s = u'{}'.format(unichr(i))

or just plain

s = unichr(i)

unichr(integer) produces a unicode character for the given codepoint.

The \uxxxx syntax only works for string literals; these are processed by the Python compiler before running the code.

Demo:

>>> for i in range(0x2550, 0x257F):
...     print unichr(i)
... 
═
║
╒
╓
╔
╕
╖
# etc.

If you ever do have literal \uxxxx sequences in your strings, you can still have Python turn those into Unicode characters with the unicode_escape codec:

>>> print u'\\u2550'
\u2550
>>> print u'\\u2550'.decode('unicode_escape')
═
>>> print '\\u2550'.decode('unicode_escape')
═
>>> '\\u2550'.decode('unicode_escape')
u'\u2550'

In Python 2, you can use this codec on both byte string and unicode string values; the output is always a unicode string.

Upvotes: 1

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