What are these little "u" in my tuple? (python 2.7)

Question

So, I am getting data from something sqlExtractor, I can not touch sqlExtractor. The problem in sqlExtractor is giving me a list of tuples (I need a list of tuples)

So, I thought about this:

myNewList = [] for tuple in myList: myNewList.append(list(tuple)) 

The problem is that my data is filled with a little "u", what do they mean? This does not bother me, but since myNewList [i] [j] will return a value without "u". But I would like to understand.

So what is it?

Thanks.

example - tuple before and after conversion:

 (u'Pado', u'Seba*', u'B31', u'27/02/2011', u'SINA', u'2', u'5', u'Paris', u'Zone bleu', u'211') [u'Pado', u'Seba*', u'B31', u'27/02/2011', u'SINA', u'2', u'5', u'Paris', u'Zone bleu', u'211'] 

Answer 1

u indicates that the string is a unicode object. See here for more details.

Answer 2

These are Unicode strings. See Unicode HOWTO .