>>> u1234 = str(b'xe1x88xb4', 'utf-8') >>> print (u1234) # if terminal supports UTF-8 AND python auto-infers ሴ >>> u1234.encode('unicode-escape') b'u1234' >>> print ('%04x' % ord(u1234)) 1234 >>> type(u1234) <class 'str'> >>> len(u1234) 1