print python emoji as unicode string

Question

I've been trying to output '??' as 'U0001f604' instead of the smiley, but it doesn't seem to work.

I tried using repr() but it gives me this 'xf0x9fx98x84'. Currently it outputs the smiley which is not what I wanted. encode('unicode_escape') gives me a UnicodeDecodeError.

The smiley was passed as a string to a class method in python. i.e. "I am happy ??"

Answer 1

>>> print u'U0001f604'.encode('unicode-escape')
U0001f604