How to print Unicode character in Python?

To include Unicode characters in your Python source code, you can use Unicode escape characters in the form \u0123 in your string. In Python 2.x, you also need to prefix the string literal with 'u'.

Here's an example running in the Python 2.x interactive console:

>>> print u'\u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u044f'Россия

In Python 2, prefixing a string with 'u' declares them as Unicode-type variables, as described in the Python Unicode documentation.

In Python 3, the 'u' prefix is now optional:

>>> print('\u0420\u043e\u0441\u0441\u0438\u044f')Россия

If running the above commands doesn't display the text correctly for you, perhaps your terminal isn't capable of displaying Unicode characters.

These examples use Unicode escapes (\u...), which allows you to print Unicode characters while keeping your source code as plain ASCII. This can help when working with the same source code on different systems. You can also use Unicode characters directly in your Python source code (e.g. print u'Россия' in Python 2), if you are confident all your systems handle Unicode files properly.

For information about reading Unicode data from a file, see this answer:

Character reading from file in Python

Print a unicode character in Python:

Print a unicode character directly from python interpreter:

el@apollo:~$ pythonPython 2.7.3>>> print u'\u2713'✓

Unicode character u'\u2713' is a checkmark. The interpreter prints the checkmark on the screen.

Print a unicode character from a python script:

Put this in test.py:

#!/usr/bin/pythonprint("here is your checkmark: " + u'\u2713');

Run it like this:

el@apollo:~$ python test.pyhere is your checkmark: ✓

If it doesn't show a checkmark for you, then the problem could be elsewhere, like the terminal settings or something you are doing with stream redirection.

Store unicode characters in a file:

Save this to file: foo.py:

#!/usr/bin/python -tt# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-import codecsimport sys UTF8Writer = codecs.getwriter('utf8')sys.stdout = UTF8Writer(sys.stdout)print(u'e with obfuscation: é')

Run it and pipe output to file:

python foo.py > tmp.txt

Open tmp.txt and look inside, you see this:

el@apollo:~$ cat tmp.txt e with obfuscation: é

Thus you have saved unicode e with a obfuscation mark on it to a file.

If you're trying to print() Unicode, and getting ascii codec errors, check out this page, the TLDR of which is do export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8 before firing up python (this variable controls what sequence of bytes the console tries to encode your string data as). Internally, Python3 uses UTF-8 by default (see the Unicode HOWTO) so that's not the problem; you can just put Unicode in strings, as seen in the other answers and comments. It's when you try and get this data out to your console that the problem happens. Python thinks your console can only handle ascii. Some of the other answers say, "Write it to a file, first" but note they specify the encoding (UTF-8) for doing so (so, Python doesn't change anything in writing), and then use a method for reading the file that just spits out the bytes without any regard for encoding, which is why that works.