Odd character appending to the front of python list -

i'm having issue regards running python on linux. i'm trying learn python , wanted try , parse small xml file , put tags , data list. every time run code 'u' appending each element in list.

[u'world'] defaultdict(<type 'list'>, {u'world': [u'data']}) 

my code follows:

import xml.sax  collections import defaultdict  class transformxml(xml.sax.contenthandler):  def __init__ (self):     self.start_tag_name = -1     self.tag_data = -1     self.mydict = defaultdict(list)     self.tags = []  def startelement(self, name, attrs):     self.start_tag_name = name     print name     print self.start_tag_name  def characters(self, content):     if content.strip(' \r\n\t') != "":         self.tag_data = content.strip(' \r\n\t')         print self.start_tag_name         self.tags.append(self.start_tag_name)         self.mydict[self.start_tag_name].append(content.strip(' \r\n\t'))  def endelement(self, name):     pass  def __del__ (self):     if self.mydict:         del self.mydict         print "deleteing mydict" 

does know issue might be?

that 'weird' symbol means string or character encoded in unicode

eg. if have string test:

>>> unicode('test') u'test' >>> s = unicode('test') >>> type(s) <type 'unicode'> 

documentation here

to sum up, according python docs,

...a unicode string sequence of code points, numbers 0 0x10ffff. sequence needs represented set of bytes (meaning, values 0-255) in memory. rules translating unicode string sequence of bytes called encoding.