Why does python print u

In python3, the abstract unicode type becomes much more prominent. Most APIs deal in the unicode type of string with just some pieces that are low level dealing with bytes. The implicit conversions between bytes and unicode is removed and whenever you want to make the conversion you need to do so explicitly. This is often the case when you need to use the value verbatim with some external resource. For instance, filenames or key values in a database. If you need both a textual string to present to the user and a byte value for an exact match, consider keeping both versions around.

You can either use two variables for this or a dict whose key is the byte value. You can use the naming convention used in kitchen as a guide for implementing your own naming convention. When you go to send your data back outside of your program to the filesystem, over the network, displaying to the user, etc turn the data back into a byte str.

How you do this will depend on the expected output format of the data. When using the encoding that the user has set for instance, using locale. You can use kitchen. When creating exception messages be sure to convert to bytes manually. Including a few characters from several different scripts is highly advised as well because some code may have special cased accented roman characters but not know how to handle characters used in Asian alphabets. Similarly, unless you know that that portion of your code will only be given unicode strings or only byte str be sure to try variables of both types in your unittests.

Make sure that the libraries you use return only unicode strings or byte str. The kitchen library provides a wide array of functions to help you deal with byte str and unicode strings in your program. Using kitchen to write good code. Enter search terms or a module, class or function name. Navigation index modules next previous kitchen 1. These are very similar in nature to how strings are handled in C.

That ' u ' is part of the external representation of the string, meaning it's a Unicode string as opposed to a byte string. It's not in the string, it's part of the type. The u makes the string a Unicode datatype. Without the u , string is just byte sequence. Sometimes when you print Unicode strings, you may get a error like this: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u 'u03b1' in position ordinal not in range The solution is to use the. Python Raw String.

Python raw string is created by prefixing a string literal with 'r' or 'R'. Python raw string treats backslash as a literal character. This is useful when we want to have a string that contains backslash and don't want it to be treated as an escape character. A prefix of ' b ' or ' B ' is ignored in Python 2; it indicates that the literal should become a bytes literal in Python 3 e. They may only contain ASCII characters; bytes with a numeric value of or greater must be expressed with escapes.

In Python , a backslash is used to indicate a character escape, for example, is a newline character. If, however, you meant r , this is a carriage return.

This looks like a regular expression regex commonly used in Django URL configurations. The ' r ' in front tells Python the expression is a raw string. Use dir or type on the 'string' to find out what it is. I suspect that it's one of BeautifulSoup's tag objects, that prints like a string, but really isn't one. Otherwise, its inside a list and you need to convert each string separately.

In any event, can't you just do str string to get a string rather than a unicode-string? This should be different for Python 3, for which all strings are unicode. Maybe i dont understand , why cant you just get the element. Convert the string from i and do whatever you wanted to do Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Python string prints as [u'String'] Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 8 months ago. Active 6 months ago. Viewed k times. This will surely be an easy one but it is really bugging me. Freek de Bruijn 3, 2 2 gold badges 23 23 silver badges 27 27 bronze badges. Does this answer your question? What's the u prefix in a Python string?

You probably have a list containing one unicode string. The repr of this is [u'String']. Python Javascript Linux Cheat sheet Contact.