What does the ‘u’ symbol mean in front of string values?

Yes in short i would like to know why am I seeing a u in front of my keys and values.

I am rendering a form. The form has check-box for the particular label and one text field for the ip address. I am creating a dictionary with keys being the label which are hardcoded in the list_key and values for the dictionary are taken from the form input (list_value). The dictionary is created but it is preceded by u for some values. here is the sample output for the dictionary:

{u'1': {'broadcast': u'on', 'arp': '', 'webserver': '', 'ipaddr': u'', 'dns': ''}}

can someone please explain what I am doing wrong. I am not getting the error when i simulate similar method in pyscripter. Any suggestions to improve the code are welcome. Thank you

#!/usr/bin/env python

import webapp2
import itertools
import cgi

form ="""
    <form method="post">
    FIREWALL 
    <br><br>
    <select name="profiles">
        <option value="1">profile 1</option>
        <option value="2">profile 2</option>
        <option value="3">profile 3</option>
    </select>
    <br><br>
    Check the box to implement the particular policy
    <br><br>

    <label> Allow Broadcast
        <input type="checkbox" name="broadcast">
    </label>
    <br><br>

    <label> Allow ARP
        <input type="checkbox" name="arp">
    </label><br><br>

    <label> Allow Web traffic from external address to internal webserver
        <input type="checkbox" name="webserver">
    </label><br><br>

    <label> Allow DNS
        <input type="checkbox" name="dns">
    </label><br><br>

    <label> Block particular Internet Protocol  address
        <input type="text" name="ipaddr">
    </label><br><br>

    <input type="submit">   
    </form>
"""
dictionarymain={}

class MainHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):  
    def get(self):
        self.response.out.write(form)

    def post(self):
        # get the parameters from the form 
        profile = self.request.get('profiles')

        broadcast = self.request.get('broadcast')
        arp = self.request.get('arp')
        webserver = self.request.get('webserver')
        dns =self.request.get('dns')
        ipaddr = self.request.get('ipaddr')


        # Create a dictionary for the above parameters
        list_value =[ broadcast , arp , webserver , dns, ipaddr ]
        list_key =['broadcast' , 'arp' , 'webserver' , 'dns' , 'ipaddr' ]

        #self.response.headers['Content-Type'] ='text/plain'
        #self.response.out.write(profile)

        # map two list to a dictionary using itertools
        adict = dict(zip(list_key,list_value))
        self.response.headers['Content-Type'] ='text/plain'
        self.response.out.write(adict)

        if profile not in dictionarymain:
            dictionarymain[profile]= {}
        dictionarymain[profile]= adict

        #self.response.headers['Content-Type'] ='text/plain'
        #self.response.out.write(dictionarymain)

        def escape_html(s):
            return cgi.escape(s, quote =True)



app = webapp2.WSGIApplication([('/', MainHandler)],
                              debug=True)

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

The ‘u’ in front of the string values means the string is a Unicode string. Unicode is a way to represent more characters than normal ASCII can manage. The fact that you’re seeing the u means you’re on Python 2 – strings are Unicode by default on Python 3, but on Python 2, the u in front distinguishes Unicode strings. The rest of this answer will focus on Python 2.

You can create a Unicode string multiple ways:

>>> u'foo'
u'foo'
>>> unicode('foo') # Python 2 only
u'foo'

But the real reason is to represent something like this (translation here):

>>> val = u'Ознакомьтесь с документацией'
>>> val
u'u041eu0437u043du0430u043au043eu043cu044cu0442u0435u0441u044c u0441 u0434u043eu043au0443u043cu0435u043du0442u0430u0446u0438u0435u0439'
>>> print val
Ознакомьтесь с документацией

For the most part, Unicode and non-Unicode strings are interoperable on Python 2.

There are other symbols you will see, such as the “raw” symbol r for telling a string not to interpret backslashes. This is extremely useful for writing regular expressions.

>>> 'foo"'
'foo"'
>>> r'foo"'
'foo\"'

Unicode and non-Unicode strings can be equal on Python 2:

>>> bird1 = unicode('unladen swallow')
>>> bird2 = 'unladen swallow'
>>> bird1 == bird2
True

but not on Python 3:

>>> x = u'asdf' # Python 3
>>> y = b'asdf' # b indicates bytestring
>>> x == y
False

Method 2

This is a feature, not a bug.

See http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html, specifically the ‘unicode type’ section.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0