[Freeipa-users] What does the "u" mean in IPA messages?

[KodaK]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 3:27 PM, John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 04:18 PM, KodaK wrote:
>>
>> When performing an operation with the IPA tools, I get a message every
>> time similar to this:
>>
>> ipa: INFO: Forwarding 'hbactest' to server u'https://ipaserver/ipa/xml'
>>
>> What does it mean?  I've never seen it say anything other than "u"
>> (that I've noticed.)  A pointer to documentation is preferred, but
>> I've been looking and haven't found anything.  (Lots of stuff on the
>> International Phonetic Alphabet's use of "u" though.  I think I'm
>> qualified to edit dictionaries now.)
>
>
> It means unicode, It's a Python'ism. In Python2 there are two different
> string types str and unicode. str's are have 8-bit characters, unicode have
> wide characters (either 16-bit UCS2 or 32-bit UCS4) depending on how Python
> was built (unicode is UCS4 on our builds). Since IPA in internationalized we
> use unicode for all strings.
>
> What the u prefix is telling you is the type of the string. The only reason
> you see it is because in some places we use the repr method to output string
> data and the repr method prefixes unicode with a u character. We've been
> fixing places where repr method is used, not sure if this is one of those or
> not. We were using repr because early on we were not consistent with whether
> we used str's or unicode objects and it was handy to know the difference,
> it's not so much of an issue any more.

Ah, thanks for the explanation.  If I build parsing scripts for
things, is the "u" going to disappear in the future with the
discontinuation of the repr method?  (That's what set this off in the
first place.)