I've got the list values stored as:
country = [u'USA']
How can I turn it into just 'USA'. I've tried str(country), but it didn't work.
2 Answers
Apply str() on the element not on the list:
In [206]: country = [u'USA']
In [207]: country[0] = str(country[0])
In [208]: country
Out[208]: ['USA']
or may be you meant this:
In [217]: country = [u'USA']
In [218]: country = str(country[0])
In [219]: country
Out[219]: 'USA'
answered Dec 24, 2012 at 3:35
Ashwini Chaudhary
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1 Comment
user1869421
Thanks...it was the second version. Thank you
country is a list that already contains Unicode strings. You don't need to convert it. The u'' syntax is just the item representation as a Python literal (how you would type it in a Python source code).
If you do need a bytestring; use .encode() method with an appropriate character encoding e.g.:
b = country[0].encode("ascii")
In general, structure a text processing code as Unicode sandwich i.e., use Unicode internally and use bytes only to communicate with outside world; don't mix the two.
[u'USA']is a list that contains a [unicode] string as the first and only element. The__str__protocol for a list will output the "[..]" as well.