What's the u prefix in a Python string?

Question

You're right, see 3.1.3. Unicode Strings.

It's been the syntax since Python 2.0.

Python 3 made them redundant, as the default string type is Unicode. Versions 3.0 through 3.2 removed them, but they were re-added in 3.3+ for compatibility with Python 2 to aide the 2 to 3 transition.

The u in u'Some String' means that your string is a Unicode string.

Q: I'm in a terrible, awful hurry and I landed here from Google Search. I'm trying to write this data to a file, I'm getting an error, and I need the dead simplest, probably flawed, solution this second.

A: You should really read Joel's Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) essay on character sets.

Q: sry no time code pls

A: Fine. try str('Some String') or 'Some String'.encode('ascii', 'ignore'). But you should really read some of the answers and discussion on Converting a Unicode string and this excellent, excellent, primer on character encoding.

My guess is that it indicates "Unicode", is it correct?

Yes.

If so, since when is it available?

Python 2.x.

In Python 3.x the strings use Unicode by default and there's no need for the u prefix. Note: in Python 3.0-3.2, the u is a syntax error. In Python 3.3+ it's legal again to make it easier to write 2/3 compatible apps.

I came here because I had funny-char-syndrome on my requests output. I thought response.text would give me a properly decoded string, but in the output I found funny double-chars where German umlauts should have been.

Turns out response.encoding was empty somehow and so response did not know how to properly decode the content and just treated it as ASCII (I guess).

My solution was to get the raw bytes with 'response.content' and manually apply decode('utf_8') to it. The result was schöne Umlaute.

The correctly decoded

für

vs. the improperly decoded

fĂźr