Python string prints as u String

Question

This will surely be an easy one but it is really bugging me    I have a script that reads in a webpage and uses Beautiful Soup to parse it  From the soup I extract all the links as my final goal is to print out the link contents   All of the text that I am parsing is ASCII  I know that Python treats strings as unicode  and I am sure this is very handy  just of no use in my wee script    Every time I go to print out a variable that holds  String  I get  u String   printed to the screen  Is there a simple way of getting this back into just ascii or should I write a regex to strip it

User · Answer

Use dir or type on the  string  to find out what it is  I suspect that it s one of BeautifulSoup s tag objects  that prints like a string  but really isn t one  Otherwise  its inside a list and you need to convert each string separately   In any case  why are you objecting to using Unicode  Any specific reason

User · Answer

Maybe i dont understand   why cant you just get the element text and then convert it before using it   for instance  dont know why you would do this but     find all label elements of the web page and iterate between them until you find one called MyText          avail              avail   driver find elements by class name  label            for i in avail                  if  i text     MyText     Convert the string from i and do whatever you wanted to do      maybe im missing something in the original message    or was this what you were looking for

User · Answer

pass the output to str   function and it will remove the convert the unicode output  also by printing the output it will remove the u   tags from it

User · Answer

u ABC   would be a one-element list of unicode strings  Beautiful Soup always produces Unicode  So you need to convert the list to a single unicode string  and then convert that to ASCII   I don t know exaxtly how you got the one-element lists  the contents member would be a list of strings and tags  which is apparently not what you have  Assuming that you really always get a list with a single element  and that your test is really only ASCII you would use this    soup 0  encode  ascii     However  please double-check that your data is really ASCII  This is pretty rare  Much more likely it s latin-1 or utf-8    soup 0  encode  latin-1      soup 0  encode  utf-8     Or you ask Beautiful Soup what the original encoding was and get it back in this encoding     soup 0  encode soup originalEncoding

User · Answer

Do you really mean u String     In any event  can t you just do str string  to get a string rather than a unicode-string   This should be different for Python 3  for which all strings are unicode

User · Answer

import json  ast r    u name   u A   u primary key   1  ast literal eval json dumps r      will print     name    A    primary key   1

User · Answer

You probably have a list containing one unicode string  The repr of this is  u String     You can convert this to a list of byte strings using any variation of the following     Functional style  print map lambda x  x encode  ascii    my list     List comprehension  print  x encode  ascii   for x in my list     Interesting if my list may be a tuple or a string  print type my list  x encode  ascii   for x in my list     What do I care about the brackets anyway  print      join repr x encode  ascii    for x in my list     That s actually not a good way of doing it  print     join repr x  lstrip  u   1 -1  for x in my list

User · Answer

If accessing printing single element lists  e g   sequentially or filtered    my list    u String     sample element my list    str my list 0

User · Answer

u String   is a text representation of a list that contains a Unicode string on Python 2   If you run print some list  then it is equivalent to print   s          join map repr  some list   i e   to create a text representation of a Python object with the type list  repr   function is called for each item   Don t confuse a Python object and its text representation   repr  a       a  and even the text representation of the text representation differs  repr repr  a       repr  a     repr obj  returns a string that contains a printable representation of an object  Its purpose is to be an unambiguous representation of an object that can be useful for debugging  in a REPL  Often eval repr obj      obj   To avoid calling repr    you could print list items directly  if they are all Unicode strings  e g   print     join some list    it prints a comma separated list of the strings  String  Do not encode a Unicode string to bytes using a hardcoded character encoding  print Unicode directly instead  Otherwise  the code may fail because the encoding can t represent all the characters e g   if you try to use  ascii  encoding with non-ascii characters  Or the code silently produces mojibake  corrupted data is passed further in a pipeline  if the environment uses an encoding that is incompatible with the hardcoded encoding

User · Answer

encode  latin-1   helped me in my case   facultyname 0  encode  latin-1

[python] Python string prints as [u'String']

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