Question

I have the following code (as an example) in a unittest TestCase

def test(self):
    a = array('u','\0'*3)
    a[0] = 'h'
    a[1] = 'h'
    a[2] = 'h'

    self.assertEqual(a.tostring(), "hhh")

The assertion fails with the following error:

AssertionError: b'h\x00\x00\x00h\x00\x00\x00h\x00\x00\x00' != 'hhh'

Now I understand that the array I created is for Unicode characters which are 4 bytes long hence the extra 3 NUL bytes for every character I entered. My questions are:

1. Can I convert the string “hhh” into Unicode representation inline of my assert?
2. Is there a ascii option to create my array with?

EDIT: to answer the questions that have come up:
1. I am using Python 3
2. array comes from module array, can be imported with: from array import array

Answer 1

I suppose you are working with Python3, which seems to lack a 'c' option for array.

In this case, I would do

a = array.array("b",4*(0,))
a[0] = 'h'
a[1] = 'h'
a[2] = 'h'

Another option would be

a=array.array('u', "hhh") # the same as yours, but shorter
a.tounicode()

But then you have a unicode string and not a bytes() object.