Can't make unicode string literal with xor symbol in Python?

Question 1

When you specify a unicode with u'\uXXXX', the XXXX must be exactly 4 hex digits. To specify a unicode with 8 hexdigits, you must use a capital U: u'\UXXXXXXXX'.

So u'\u10308' is actually two characters, u'\u1030' followed by u'8'.

u'\u1030' is the MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN UU character, which is a non-spacing mark. This character is not visible along the baseline in and of itself. So all you end up seeing is the 8.

The symbol you posted is the OLD ITALIC LETTER THE unicode character.

In [103]: print(u'\N{OLD ITALIC LETTER THE}')
𐌈

In [104]: print(u'\U00010308')
𐌈

The XOR unicode character is:

In [105]: print(u'\N{XOR}')
⊻

In [106]: print(u'\u22bb')
⊻

Other characters you might find useful:

In [110]: print(u'\N{CIRCLED PLUS}')
⊕

In [111]: print(u'\N{CIRCLED TIMES}')
⊗

In [112]: print(u'\N{N-ARY CIRCLED PLUS OPERATOR}')
⨁

In [113]: print(u'\N{N-ARY CIRCLED TIMES OPERATOR}')
⨂

PS. You can find the Unicode name of (some) unicode characters this way:

In [95]: import unicodedata as UD

In [96]: UD.name('𐌈'.decode('utf-8'))
Out[96]: 'OLD ITALIC LETTER THE'

Question 2

The primary problem is that the \u escape sequence only makes use of the next four hexadecimal digits, so u"\u10308" is the string containing Unicode codepoint U+1030 (MYANMAR VOWEL SIGN UU) followed by 8. Apparently, your terminal does not have the proper fonts to display Myanmar characters, so the first character does not appear when printed. In order to specify a Unicode codepoint with more than four hex digits, you need to use \U followed by eight digits, i.e., u"\U00010308". However, note that the character you're trying to obtain is actually OLD ITALIC LETTER THE, which may look like (one of the many symbols for) XOR but is different. A more appropriate choice for your desired glyph is U+2297 (CIRCLED TIMES, or ⊗).