doctest-ignore-unicode is a plugin (currently only for Nose) that adds a flag to ignore unicode literal prefixes in doctests.
The implmentation is inspired by https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/2and3/nltk/test/doctest_nose_plugin.py
>>> def hello_world(): ... return 'Hello World' >>> hello_world() # doctest: +IGNORE_UNICODE u'Hello World'
If you need to ask you probably don't need it. (Hint: supporting python 2 & 3 in the same codebase).