cool

Not a good practice to use exceptions for implementing normal program flow.

Old katas tend to have skewed difficulties

You're right, 3*9 = 27, £ == -1, so 27+(-1) == 26

"For example, the number 26 as an input should return 3^"
Is this correct or should it be '3£' ?

clever

I am not sure where Codewars rules say thay you need to be as fast as possible :)

i mean, codewars is sbout doing it as fast as possible, even if its extremely ugly

Only solution I find here which is short, clever but still clear and easy to follow and explained. Congrats!

This is the same cheese I did.
I did not vote it as clever because an fstring could be considered a fundamental python feature.
IMO clever code should be the use of obscure stuff so for Python 3 this should be best practice.

Exactly like my solution

so good format function not use regular expression

youve got to be kidding me