I’m working on a Python Telegram bot and trying to include emojis in my messages to make them look better. However, I’m having trouble getting the emojis to display correctly.
I’ve attempted two different approaches but neither seems to work as expected:
["EUR TO USD: 1.0842", "CHANGE: +0.0023 (+0.21%)\ud83d\udcb9"]
The emoji appears as escaped Unicode characters instead of the actual emoji. What’s the correct way to send emojis through a Telegram bot using Python?
This is probably a string encoding issue or your terminal/IDE display settings. I’ve run into the same thing with Telegram bots and emojis. First, drop the ‘u’ prefix from your unicode string if you’re using Python 3. Should be: rate_info = "EUR TO USD: " + current_rate + ", CHANGE: " + rate_change + ‘\U0001F4B9’. Make sure your Python file is saved as UTF-8. Sometimes it’s not the code - it’s how your editor handles unicode characters. Fixed mine instantly when I changed the encoding settings. Also check if you’re accidentally converting your message to a list somewhere. Those array brackets in your output are a dead giveaway.
The escaped unicode output means you’re serializing or logging the message as a string representation instead of the actual content. I’ve hit this same issue debugging bot messages - those escaped characters show up in logs or when you print the message object rather than what users actually see. Check what recipients see in their Telegram clients instead of trusting console output. Your second method with direct emoji paste should work fine. If users still aren’t seeing it properly, make sure your bot’s message parsing mode isn’t messing things up. Sometimes setting parse_mode explicitly fixes character encoding issues in the telegram library.
had this exact problem last week! i was stringifying the message somewhere in my code, which caused the unicode escaping. check if you’re doing json.dumps() or str() on your message before sending it. also make sure you’re not accidentally printing debug info instead of checking the actual telegram chat - the console output shows escaped chars but users see proper emojis.