# Is this jinja array or list if it starts with \[u' ?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/is-this-jinja-array-or-list-if-it-starts-with-u/25845>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [October 27, 2017, 4:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/is-this-jinja-array-or-list-if-it-starts-with-u/25845 "2017-10-27T16:11:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Abey\_Thomas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Abey\_Thomas](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Abey_Thomas)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2017, 4:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/is-this-jinja-array-or-list-if-it-starts-with-u/25845/1 "2017-10-27T16:11:37Z")

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Hi,

I tried to convert a hash to a list. When I try to debug my list its showing

“msg”: " [u’value1’, u’value2’]\n"

Looks like an array to me. What kind of object is this? Can i convert this back to list? I tried to do us append(value) in a loop to build this value array

Regards,  
Abey

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/original/1X/1882d9a01da5d8996a862359b0913cc568a39b84.svg) [@system](https://forum.ansible.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2017, 4:25pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/is-this-jinja-array-or-list-if-it-starts-with-u/25845/2 "2017-10-27T16:25:02Z")

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Array and List are 2 different names for the same thing, what you are  
seeing is an array/list of unicode strings (leading u' ' in front of  
string means its unicode in Python).