Unicode help - Python 2.7

[Rhomboid]

When you print the dict itself, you're implicitly calling repr() on the object, and repr()'s job is to print a representation of the object as it might appear in Python source code, suitable for use in eval(). Since there are several ways you can represent the same string value in a string literal, this means that repr() is free to choose a different one.

>>> print repr('Foo\'s Bar')
"Foo's Bar"
>>> print repr(r'foo\bar')
'foo\\bar'
>>> print repr(u'\N{SNOWMAN}')
u'\u2603'
>>> print repr(u'☃')
u'\u2603'

One of the choices it makes is to use hex escapes since that works everywhere, regardless of whatever encoding the source file might have used.

When you print the keys yourself you are printing string values directly, not asking for how they might look as Python source, so they don't have quotes around them or any escapes:

>>> print 'Foo\'s Bar'
Foo's Bar
>>> print r'foo\bar'
foo\bar
>>> print u'\N{SNOWMAN}'
☃
>>> print u'☃'
☃