[Tutor] trouble with stringio function in python 3.2

[Peter Otten]

Peter Otten wrote:

> anupama srinivas murthy wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> My python code needs to run on versions 2.7 to 3.4. To use stringio
>> function as appropriate, the code i use is;
>> 
>> if sys.version < '3':
>>             dictionary = io.StringIO(u"""\n""".join(english_words))
>>         else:
>>             dictionary = io.StringIO("""\n""".join(english_words))
>> 
>> The code runs fine on all versions mentioned above except for 3.2 where i
>> get the error:
>> dictionary = io.StringIO(u"""\n""".join(english_words))
>>                                     ^
>> SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>> 
>> How can I solve the issue?
> 
> Unfortunately Python 3.2 doesn't understand the u-prefixed syntax for
> unicode strings. Are the strings in english_words all unicode? Then
> 
> dictionary = io.StringIO("\n".join(english_words))
> 
> should work. In Python 3 "\n" is unicode anyway, and Python 2 implicitly
> converts "\n" to unicode:
> 
> $ python
> Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56)
> [GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> "\n".join([u"foo", u"bar"])
> u'foo\nbar'

There is also the

from __future__ import unicode_literals

directive in Python 2.7. With that

"..." will be unicode, and bytestrings must be marked b"...".
The latter is understood by both 2.7 and 3.x