removing prefix u's from string characters

Question

This is the partial code I am working where I am trying to retrieve the genres of movies.

genres = tr.find('span', 'genre').find_all('a')
genres = [g.contents[0] for g in genres]
print genres

[u'Animation']
[u'Comedy']
[u'Comedy', u'Romance']

I want to remove those u prefix.

Desired output:

['Animation']
['Comedy']
['Comedy', 'Romance']

Are you trying to generate output (e.g., to a file) where these characters would screw up parsing? The prefix 'u' is informational so you know the type of string that Python is outputting. It's similar to the 'L' that's appended to Python long integers. — bmhkim
– bmhkim, Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 21:47

Christian Tapia · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-10 22:56:13Z

2

The u means that those strings are codified as unicode.

If you want to remove it you can just do:

genres = [str(g.contents[0]) for g in genres]

Notes:

This will only work if all characters in the string are ascii characters.
As others commented, the u is not part of the string, it just indicates its codification, so there is no reason to remove it.

edited Feb 10, 2015 at 22:56

answered Feb 10, 2015 at 21:47

Christian Tapia

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1 Comment

bmhkim Over a year ago

As with limelights's response, this will only work if the unicode strings contain only ascii characters.

Henrik Andersson · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-10 21:47:49Z

2

There is no need to actually remove the unicode from your string but if you're still set on doing it, you can either use map() or a list comprehension.

map(str, [u'Comedy', u'Romance'])
>> ['Comedy', 'Romance']

or the list comp

l = [str(x) for x in ['Comedy', 'Romance']]

answered Feb 10, 2015 at 21:47

Henrik Andersson

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1 Comment

Henrik Andersson Over a year ago

That is totally correct, I haven't had time to write it in my answer yet. Thanks!

Hackaholic · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-10 21:47:50Z

1

the prefix u in the string represent Unicode

>>> unicode("abc")
u'abc'

No need to remove it

answered Feb 10, 2015 at 21:47

Hackaholic

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