mysterious unicode

[Gerry]

I'm using pyExcelerator and xlrd to read and write data from and to
two spreadsheets.

I created the "read" spreadsheet by importing a text file - and I had
no unicode aspirations.

When I read a cell, it appears to be unicode u'Q1", say.

I can try cleaning it, like this:


    try:
        s.encode("ascii", "replace")
    except AttributeError:
        pass


which seems to work.  Here's the mysterious part (aside from why
anything was unicode in the first place):

                print >> debug, "c=", col, "r=", row, "v=", value,
"qno=", qno
                tuple = (qno, family)
                try:
                    data[tuple].append(value)
                except:
                    data[tuple] = [value]
                print >> debug, "!!!", col, row, qno, family, tuple,
value, data[tuple]

which produces:

c= 1 r= 3 v= 4 qno= Q1
!!! 1 3 Q1 O (u'Q1', 'O') 4 [1, u' ', 4]

where qno seems to be a vanilla Q1, but a tuple using qno is
(u'Q1', ...).

Can somebody help me out?