Working with unicode in python

omg_unicode

def omg_unicode(some_input):
	"""
	Decode input immediately, work internally with unicode, encode at the end
	Remember: Bytes in --> unicode everywhere --> bytes out
	"""

	# Decode your input (convert from <type 'str'> to <type 'unicode'>) 
	unicode_string = some_input.decode('utf8','ignore')

	# Unicode all the things! (i.e. precede text with u and refer to non-ascii characters by their unicode code point)
	string1 = u"Arabic: \u0687, Tibetan: \u0fbf, Greek: \u03C0 (mmm pie)"
	string2 = u"Monkey emoji: \U0001f648 \U0001F649 \U0001F64A "
	string3 = u"This string is all ascii letters, but I'm unicoding it anyway."

	output = unicode_string + "\n" + string1 + "\n" + string2 + "\n" + string3

	# At the end, call .encode() on text you want to send to the outside world.
	byte_string = output.encode('utf8')

	print byte_string