[Fixed] NameError Name ‘unicode’ is Not Defined in Python

Use str() Method

To resolve the NameError: name 'unicode' is not defined, replace the occurrence of unicode() with str(). This issue occurs because unicode() was renamed to str() in Python 3.

Unicode is a computing industry standard that ensures that text from most of the world’s writing systems is consistently encoded, rendered, and processed.

A Unicode string is composed of Unicode code points written using a backslash followed by a series of four hexadecimal digits.

Its use allows for more excellent compatibility between software programs and operating systems as it is not limited to the ASCII character set, which contains only the Latin alphabet and a few other characters. In addition, it represents letters, glyphs, symbols, and other special characters from any language, providing greater flexibility.

The management of these strings has changed significantly in Python 3. Days are gone of using unicode() for these strings; Python’s str() has taken its place. It is a powerful way that stores and manipulates Unicode characters more efficiently than others.

The str() allows users to create multilingual documents, manipulate the text in different character encodings, and access characters outside the standard ASCII range.

We used the str() class in my_String to read the Unicode code point \0061 as a letter a.

Use sys.version_info with str

To resolve the NameError: name 'unicode' is not defined in Python:

• Use sys.version_info[0] to check if the version of the Python interpreter is greater than 3. If it is, replace by initializing a unicode variable with an str class.
• Use unicode() to read the provided Unicode code point as a string.

While explaining the code snippet for using the str() class, we covered Unicode, Unicode String, and the str(). In this section, we used the Python sys package.

Python’s sys module provides access to system-specific details, information about the operating system, and operations like retrieving environment variables, executing shell commands, and process management.

It allows the user to access information about the Python interpreter, such as platform, version number, etc.

To provide information about the version of the Python interpreter at runtime, sys provides the version_info attribute.

It is a named tuple with five fields: major, minor, micro, releaselevel, and serial that keeps the interpreter up to date by determining the available features on a given system.

For example, we used this attribute to write code compatible with version 3 of Python with an if condition. If it is, we declare a unicode variable and initialize it with the str class.

We used the unicode to read the Unicode code point \0061 as a letter a and stored it in the my_String.

Use six.text_type

To resolve the NameError: name 'unicode' is not defined in Python, use isinstance(my_string, six.text_type) to check if the string is a Unicode string.

The six library is designed to provide compatibility between different versions of Python by writing code that works across multiple versions with minimal changes.

It allows developers to write code in either version without worrying about whether it will break in another version or not.

Constants from the six library may vary between Python versions. The text_type, which represents textual data, is one of them.

In Python 2, it is unicode, whereas in Python 3, it is str. So, for example, we used the text_type inside an if statement to check if my_String is an instance of six.text_type using the instanceof() function checks whether an object belongs to a given type (class) or not.

That’s all about how to resolve NameError Name ‘unicode’ is not defined in Python.