I think you need like this,

print [unicode(val,'utf-8') for val in l]

[u'love song', u'cooki monster definit medal gold card mcdonald', u'c start cup', u'c', u'h help bc cooki moster gott help', u'cooki monster get diabet', u'lll']

Note: Answer provided for python 2 version As per Austin commented, Literal strings are unicode by default in Python 3. So you don't need to convert externally.

Every codepoint has a name, so you are effectively asking for the Unicode standard list of codepoint names (as well as the *list of name aliases, supported by Python 3.3 and up).

Each Python version supports a specific version of the Unicode standard; the unicodedata.unidata_version attribute tells you which one for a given Python runtime. The above links lead to the latest published Unicode version, replace UCD/latest in the URLs with the value of unicodedata.unidata_version for your Python version.

Per codepoint, the unicodedata.name() function can tell you the official name, and unicodedata.lookup() gives you the inverse (name to codepoint).

Emojis exist in several Unicode ranges, represented by this regex pattern:

>>> import re
>>> emoji = re.compile('[\\u203C-\\u3299\\U0001F000-\\U0001F644]')

You can use that to filter your lists:

>>> list(filter(emoji.match, ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'tweet', 'with', 'two', 'emoticons', '😃', '⚓️']))
['😃', '⚓️']

N.B.: The pattern is an approximation and may capture some additional characters.

>>> import sys
>>> lst = [u'\u5de5', u'\u5de5']
>>> msg = repr([x.encode(sys.stdout.encoding) for x in lst]).decode('string-escape')
>>> print msg
['工', '工']

Literal strings are unicode by default in Python3.

Assuming that text is a bytes object, just use text.decode('utf-8')

unicode of Python2 is equivalent to str in Python3, so you can also write:

str(text, 'utf-8')

if you prefer.

try applying unicode to its elements

>>> lst=['Justice league', 'Avenger']
>>> map(unicode,lst)
[u'Justice league', u'Avenger']

Obviously we are talking about Python 2 only, since literal strings are unicode by default in Python 3

Have a look at this Q&A on the same subject

Sometimes this dirty hack is enough

try:
    unicode
except NameError:
    unicode = str

@honi wrote good advice, use six.

Encode each value in the list to a string:

[x.encode('UTF8') for x in EmployeeList]

You need to pick a valid encoding; don't use str() as that'll use the system default (for Python 2 that's ASCII) which will not encode all possible codepoints in a Unicode value.

UTF-8 is capable of encoding all of the Unicode standard, but any codepoint outside the ASCII range will lead to multiple bytes per character.

However, if all you want to do is test for a specific string, test for a unicode string and Python won't have to auto-encode all values when testing for that:

u'1001' in EmployeeList.values()