python - 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'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.

Answer 1

it's an indication of unicode string. similar to r'' for raw string.

>>> type(u'abc')
<type 'unicode'>
>>> r'abc'
'ab\c'