Special characters in Python strings when writing code

Question

I have following line in my code:

if "♠" in text:
    do_something()

When working no some UTF-16 encoded text files. It works but it looks kind of silly (to me). Is there any way to write something along the lines of "\\code for this character here" instead so it works on text data opened with UTF-16 encoding ? Also how do I go around using this in regex ? Say I want to match every line beginning with ♠ or ♥ symbol.

Thanks for help :)

Answer 1

If you want a symbolic name, you can use \\N{unicode character name} :

'\N{BLACK SPADE SUIT}'

(Name as found on http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2660/index.htm ).