As per the discussion here:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2013-July/022419.html

\N{} escapes should support the Unicode code point notation U+xxxx (where there are four, five or six hex digits after the U+).

E.g. '\N{U+03BB}' => 'λ'

unicodedata.lookup should also support such numeric names, e.g.:

unicodedata.lookup('U+03BB') => 'λ'

As '+' is otherwise prohibited in Unicode character names, there should never be ambiguity between 'U+xxxx' as a code point and an actual name, and a single lookup function can handle both.

(See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch04.pdf#G39 for details on characters allowed in names.)


Also add a function for the reverse

unicodedata.codepoint('λ') => 'U+03BB'


def codepoint(c):
    return 'U+{:04X}'.format(ord(c))

I've attached a patch for this.

I agree with the proposal.

Some of the code seems redundant with code we already have.
In Python, I would write

def codepoint_from_U_notation(name, namelen):
  if not (4 <= namelen <= 6): raise <wrong length>
  return chr(int(name, 16))

maybe with try-except to re-write error messages like
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 16: '99x3'
ValueError: chr() arg not in range(0x110000)

My point is that we already have code to convert hex strings to int; I presume PyUnicode_FromOrdinal(code) is the C version of 'chr' that already checks the max value.