Another solution is to use the name aliases and print them using the string literal \N

print('\N{grinning face with smiling eyes}')

Current list of name aliases can be found at: https://unicode.org/Public/15.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData-15.0.0d6.txt

Or the Folder for everything here: https://unicode.org/Public/

'😀' is already a Unicode object. UTF-8 is not Unicode, it's a byte encoding for Unicode. To get the codepoint number of a Unicode character, you can use the ord function. And to print it in the form you want you can format it as hex. Like this:

s = '😀'
print('U+{:X}'.format(ord(s)))

output

U+1F600

If you have Python 3.6+, you can make it even shorter (and more efficient) by using an f-string:

s = '😀'
print(f'U+{ord(s):X}')

BTW, if you want to create a Unicode escape sequence like '\U0001F600' there's the 'unicode-escape' codec. However, it returns a bytes string, and you may wish to convert that back to text. You could use the 'UTF-8' codec for that, but you might as well just use the 'ASCII' codec, since it's guaranteed to only contain valid ASCII.

s = '😀'
print(s.encode('unicode-escape'))
print(s.encode('unicode-escape').decode('ASCII'))

output

b'\\U0001f600'
\U0001f600

I suggest you take a look at this short article by Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Here's some code that will take any character that maps into two UTF-16 words and convert it to a hex sequence.

s = '\U0001f62c \U0001f60e hello'

def pairup(b):
    return [(b[i] << 8 | b[i+1]) for i in range(0, len(b), 2)]

def utf16(c):
    e = c.encode('utf_16_be')
    return ''.join(chr(x) for x in pairup(e))

u = ''.join(utf16(c) for c in s)
print(repr(u))
print(u[0] == '\ud83d' and u[1] == '\ude2c')
print(len(u))

'\ud83d\ude2c \ud83d\ude0e hello'
True
11

I thought this was going to be a no-brainer, but it turned out to be trickier than I expected. Especially since I didn't understand the problem properly the first time through.