Question

Firstly, is there one?

If not, is there a nice way to force something like

print '%s' % obj

to call obj.__unicode__ instead of obj.__str__?

Answer 1

Just use a unicode format string, rather than having a byte string in that role:

>>> class X(object):
...   def __str__(self): return 'str'
...   def __unicode__(self): return u'unicode'
... 
>>> x = X()
>>> print u'%s' % x
unicode