[Tutor] trouble with stringio function in python 3.2

[Peter Otten]

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'