Add a single backslash (“\”) to string in python

Question

I have an array of strings which looks like:

["U0001f308", "U0001F602"]

I need to add “\” in front of the first letter U so the output will be like:

["\U0001f308", "\U0001F602"]

This is the code I have tried so far:

matches = ["U0001f308", "U0001F602"]
emojis = [emoji.replace('U', r"\U") for emoji in matches]
print(emojis) #this prints ['\\U0001f308', '\\U0001F602'] which has two blacklashes

How can i add only one backslash in front of every string?

Answer 1

I guess what you want is the following code:

matches = ["U0001f308", "U0001F602"]
emojis = [emoji.replace('U', r"\U").encode().decode('unicode-escape') for emoji in matches]
print(emojis)

which prints

['🌈', '😂']

It's the same result as when we execute the following code:

print(["\U0001f308", "\U0001F602"])