extract strings from list

Question

I have this segment of code to extract the shortest path in a graph from one node to another

g = json_graph.node_link_graph(json.load(open("MPLS-topo.json")))
paths = nx.shortest_path(g, "H1", weight="weight")
for dest in paths.keys():  # Nicely output all those paths
  if dest == "H2":
    print "Shortest Path from H1 to {} is:".format(dest)
    print "{}".format(paths[dest])

the output of it is

 Shortest Path from H1 to H2 is:
 ['H1', u'S1', u'S2', u'S3', u'S5', u'H2']

I want to remove u and convert the path to string like this

 H1-S1-S2-S3-S5-H2

I tried this

 path = [s.replace('u', '') for s in paths[dest]]
 print path
 y = "-".join(path)

but it gives me the same output. How can I do this in python?

Answer 1

Please try encode option which will convert unicode into string format:

path = [s.encode('utf-8') for s in li]
print("-".join(path))

This should give you the desired output.