On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:13:50 am David Hutto wrote:
> I see it now. I knew that the u outside ' ' is the coding for the
> string, but I thought I had to strip it before using it since that
> was how it showed up. The bug of course would be that graphs that
> start with u would go to the second letter, but the u would still be
> used in alphabetization, because the alphabetizing is prior to
> stripping.
No, the u is not part of the string, it is part of the *syntax* for the
string, just like the quotation marks. The first character of "abc" is
a and not ", and the first character of u"abc" is also a and not u.
Another way to think of it... the u" " of Unicode strings is just a
delimiter, just like the [ ] of lists or { } of dicts -- it's not part
of the string/list/dict.
In Python 3 this confusion is lessened. Unicode strings (characters) are
written using just " as the delimiter (or ' if you prefer), instead of
u" " as used by Python 2. Byte strings are written using b" " instead.
This makes the common case (text strings) simple, and the uncommon case
(byte strings) more complicated.
--
Steven D'Aprano
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