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 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 __builtins__.unicode.__repr__(self).lstrip('u') ...  >>> unicode('a') a 

..but don’t do that, it’s horrible