Fun stuff with unicode in python

Fun fact: you can interpolate a unicode character into a unicode string literal by using \N{name of character}

Example:

>>> print u'this sign is \N{VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF} off'.encode('utf8')
this sign is ½ off

You can tell the name of any given character by using the unicodedata module

>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name(u'\xbd')
'VULGAR FRACTION ONE HALF'

The name of the famous snowman character is simply enough 'SNOWMAN.

>>> unicodedata.name(unichr(9731))
'SNOWMAN'

So you can represent this character in python simply by u'\N{SNOWMAN}'