code: def u(string):
      """Cast to unicode DAMMIT!
      Written because Python2 repr always implicitly casts to a string, so we
      have to cast back to a unicode (and we know that we always deal with valid
      unicode, because we check that in the beginning).
      """
      if sys.version_info.major >= 3:
          return str(string)
  
      if not isinstance(string, unicode):
          return unicode(str(string), "UTF-8")
      return string
  
imports: import os
  import sys
  import platform
label_desc: Use image node_id 2 for calling a global function with example usage: u(string) and returns: string, str, unicode