Suppress the u'prefix indicating unicode' in python strings

Question

Is there a way to globally suppress the unicode string indicator in python? I'm working exclusively with unicode in an application, and do a lot of interactive stuff. Having the u'prefix' show up in all of my debug output is unnecessary and obnoxious. Can it be turned off?

Answer 1

You could use Python 3.0.. The default string type is unicode, so the u'' prefix is no longer required..

In short, no. You cannot turn this off.

The u comes from the unicode.__repr__ method, which is used to display stuff in REPL:

>>> print repr(unicode('a'))
u'a'
>>> unicode('a')
u'a'

If I'm not mistaken, you cannot override this without recompiling Python.

The simplest way around this is to simply print the the string..

>>> print unicode('a')
a

If you use the unicode() builtin to construct all your strings, you could do something like..

>>> class unicode(unicode):
...     def __repr__(self):
...             return str(self)
... 
>>> unicode('a')
a

..but don't do that, it's horrible

Answer 2

Try this trick at the start of your program:

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Answer 3

I know this isn't a global option, but you can also suppress the Unicode u by placing the string in a str() function.

So a Unicode derived list that would look like:

>>> myList=[unicode('a'),unicode('b'),unicode('c')]
>>> myList
[u'a', u'b', u'c']

would become this:

>>> myList=[str(unicode('a')),str(unicode('b')),str(unicode('c'))]
>>> myList
['a', 'b', 'c']

It's a bit cumbersome, but might be useful to some one