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

[Martin Kosek]

On 02/28/2013 11:34 PM, KodaK wrote:
> 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.)

To answer your question - yes, these are going to disappear. A code fixing
these strings was already pushed to our upstream git repository. You can check
the relevant ticket here:

https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/3121

Maritn