Suppress the u'prefix indicating unicode' in python strings

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?

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

I had a case where I needed drop the u prefix because I was setting up some javascript with python as part of an html template. A simple output left the u prefix in for the dict keys e.g.

var turns = [{u'armies':2...];

which breaks javascript.

In order to get the output javascript needed, I used the json python module to encode the string for me:

turns = json.dumps(turns)

This does the trick in my particular case and as the keys are all ascii there is no worry about the encoding. You could probably use this trick for your debug output.