This is the first time I've came across this. Just printed a list and each element seems to have a u in front of it i.e.
[u'hello', u'hi', u'hey'] What does it mean and why would a list have this in front of each element?
As I don't know how common this is, if you'd like to see how I came across it, I'll happily edit the post.
it's an indication of unicode string. similar to r'' for raw string.
>>> type(u'abc') >>> r'ab\c' 'ab\\c' The u just means that the following string is a unicode string (as opposed to a plain ascii string). It has nothing to do with the list that happens to contain the (unicode) strings.
I believe the u' prefix creates a unicode string instead of regular ascii