What does 'u' mean in a list?

Question

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         


        

Answer 1

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.