Practical Maya Programming with Python

Unicode strings

I can think of nothing else that has caused programmers more confusion than Unicode strings. I will not even attempt to explain the issues surrounding Unicode, but I feel it's important to bring up so when you see something like the following, you will be prepared.

>>> import pymel.core as pmc
>>> xform = pmc.polyCube()[0]
>>> myname = 'cubexform'
>>> xform.rename(myname)
>>> xform.name()
u'cubexform'

Unicode strings in Python 2 are prefixed with a u character. So how come even though we named our node using a "regular" (byte) string with no prefix, we got back a Unicode string from the xform.name() method?

Well, "regular" strings in Python 2 (the str type) support ASCII characters only. ASCII is able to represent a very limited number ...