How to print strange string characters?

Question

I have a list with names. Some of them consists of strange chars like ★ or ™. When I am iterating threw list, it prints just fine:

★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife | Safari Mesh (Battle-Scarred)
Souvenir USP-S | Night Ops (Well-Worn)
StatTrak™ G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)

However, when I try to print it one by one:

print a[0]
'\xe2\x98\x85 StatTrak\xe2\x84\xa2 Huntsman Knife | Safari Mesh (Battle-Scarred)'

How to solve this problem?

UPDATE:

Iterating:

list = ['★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife | Safari Mesh (Battle-Scarred)',
'Souvenir USP-S | Night Ops (Well-Worn)',
'StatTrak™ G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)']

for name in list:
    print name

>>> 
★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife | Safari Mesh (Battle-Scarred)
Souvenir USP-S | Night Ops (Well-Worn)
StatTrak™ G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)

However:

list[0]
>>> 
'StatTrak\xe2\x84\xa2 G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)'

Answer 1

There is no problem with your situation, I think you just need a little clarification. But first, you have 2 typos I would love you to correct:

1. list[2] instead of list[0]
2. a[0] instead of print a[0]

When you type list[2] directly, you get this output:

'StatTrak\xe2\x84\xa2 G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)'

That is because:

list[2] + Enter ↔ list[2].__repr__() + Enter

I mean you get the UTF-8 representation of list[2]. Note that Python picks up this UTF-8 representation from the environment it's been initiated from and which you can check by typing:

>>> import sys
>>> print sys.stdout.encoding
UTF-8

But if you type print list[2] you get:

>>> print list[2]
StatTrak™ G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)
>>> 

That is because when you call print with a bystring Python convert to to unicode first. I mean:

print list[2]

↕ (is equivalent to)

print b"'StatTrak\xe2\x84\xa2 G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)'".decode('utf-8')

Demo:

>>> print b"'StatTrak\xe2\x84\xa2 G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)'".decode('utf-8')
'StatTrak™ G3SG1 | The Executioner (Minimal Wear)'
>>> 

Simply:

>>> a='★ '
>>> b='™'
>>> a
'\xe2\x98\x85 '
>>> b
'\xe2\x84\xa2'
>>> print b"'\xe2\x98\x85 '".decode('utf-8')
'★ '
>>> print b"'\xe2\x84\xa2'".decode('utf-8')
'™'
>>> print a
★ 
>>> print b
™
>>>