Why is it when I print something, there is always a unicode next to it? (Python)

Question

[u'Iphones', u'dont', u'receieve', u'messages']

Is there a way to print it without the "u" in front of it?

Answer 1

What you are seeing is the __repr__() representation of the unicode string which includes the u to make it clear. If you don't want the u you could print the object (using __str__) - this works for me:

print [str(x) for x in l]

Probably better is to read up on python unicode and encode using the particular unicode codec you want:

print [x.encode() for x in l]

[edit]: to clarify repr and why the u is there - the goal of repr is to provide a convenient string representation, "to return a string that would yield an object with the same value when passed to eval()". Ie you can copy and paste the printed output and get the same object (list of unicode strings).

Answer 2

Python contains string classes for both unicode strings and regular strings. The u before a string indicates that it is a unicode string.

>>> mystrings = [u'Iphones', u'dont', u'receieve', u'messages']
>>> [str(s) for s in mystrings]
['Iphones', 'dont', 'receieve', 'messages']
>>> type(u'Iphones')
<type 'unicode'>
>>> type('Iphones')
<type 'str'>

See http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#sequence-types-str-unicode-list-tuple-buffer-xrange for more information about the string types available in Python.