Twitter中的Unicode字符（Python）

Question

I've learned how to send tweets with Python, but I'm wondering if it's possible to send emojis or other special Unicode characters in the tweets.

For example, when I try to tweet u'1F430', it simply shows up as "1F430" in the tweet.

Answer 1

u'1F430' is the literal string "1F430". What character are you trying to get? In general you can get literal bytes into a python string using "\\x20", eg

>>> print(b"#\x20#")
# #

The byte with hexadecimal value of 20 (decimal 32) in between 2 hashes. Bytes are decoded as ASCII by default, and ASCII char (hex) 20 is a space.

>>> print(u"#\u0020#")
# #
>>> print(u"#\U0001F430#")
# #

Unicode codepoint 20 (a single space) in the middle of 2 hashes

See https://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/unicode.html for more info. NB It can get a little confusing since python will implicitly convert between bytes and unicode (using the ASCII encoding) in a lot of cases, which can hide the issue from you for a while.

Answer 2

>>> len(u'1f430')
5
>>> len(u'\U0001F430') 
1 # the latter might be equal to two in Python 2 on a narrow build (Windows, OS X)

The former is 5 characters, the latter is a single character.

If you want to specify the character in Python source code then you could use its name for readability:

>>> print(u"\N{RABBIT FACE}")
🐰

Note: it might not work in Windows console. To display non-BMP Unicode characters there, you could use win-unicode-console + ConEmu .

If you are reading it from a file, network, etc then this character is no different from any other: to decode bytes into Unicode text, you should specify a character encoding eg:

import io

with io.open('filename', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    text = file.read()

Which specific encoding to use depends on the source eg, see A good way to get the charset/encoding of an HTTP response in Python