title: how to get rid of unicode u'string' prefix in Python
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/761361/suppress-the-uprefix-indicating-unicode-in-python-strings">Suppress the u&#39;prefix indicating unicode&#39; in python strings</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I assume this is an easy question, I even haven't found an answer on the Web.</p>
  
  <p>I have a string that is unicode encoded and when I print it to the console the string looks like</p>
  
  <p><code>u'mystring</code>'</p>
  
  <p>but I want to get the string itself without 'u' prefix, like</p>
  
  <pre><code>'mystring'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The question is how to do it?</p>
  
  <p>thanks in advance, guys.</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE:</p>
  
  <p>I use the following code: </p>
  
  <pre><code>    req = urllib2.Request(link)
      req.add_header('User-agent','Mozilla/5.0')
      result = urllib2.urlopen(req)
      print result.url
  </code></pre>