Field values returned in unicode

Zeke

In the code below, the field values are returned in unicode (e.g. (u'  06510',)). How do I get this to return ascii, as in 06510,? Thanks. Hopefully doing this right, new forums confusing.

with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(fc, "OLDPLATE") as rows:

        for row in rows:

            if row is None or len(row) == 0: lstNullOldPlates.append("Null or empty")

            else: lstAllOldPlates.append('{0}'.format(row))

Zeke

Thanks Ian, but ord didn't work. The values are test, a mix of letters, blanks and numbers. Ord() works on one at a time, and gave me a TypeError when I tried parsing the values.

I did manage to fix the problem though. I'd forgotten that arcpy.da returns a tuple, not the (in this case) text value. When I added row[0] to the processing instead of just row, it worked as desired. Thanks everyone. I hesitate to mark my own answer as correct, don't want to violate protocol, but on the other hand that might be useful to others.