@amharder If you want to use Unicode characters in string literals, there are a few better options than unichr. For all of them, you should use unicode strings (u"...", with a u before the string) because Python 2's old str strings don't work properly with Unicode.

First, you can use a Unicode hex escape like u"\u2654", this is simple but not much nicer than unichr. There are also Unicode name escapes like u"\N{WHITE CHESS KING}", this inserts the Unicode character with that name into the string.

The third option is to copy and paste the characters you need directly into the Unicode string. If you do this, you also need to add the following line to the start of your script:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

This comment tells Python how Unicode characters are stored in the file, so it knows how to read them. Then you can type or paste any Unicode character into your u"..." string and it will appear correctly.

By the way, Python 3 is much better at handling Unicode than Python 2 is. Python 3's str supports Unicode correctly, so you don't have to use unicode and u"..." strings by hand, and you can type Unicode characters directly into your file without adding a coding line at the top. There are lots of other great features in Python 3 too. If you're already using Pythonista 3, you can try switching your Python version to 3.5 and see if your script runs with that.