Writing code for Python 2 and 3

IPython 6 requires Python 3, so our compatibility module IPython.utils.py3compat is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. In most cases, we recommend you use the six module to support compatible code. This is widely used by other projects, so it is familiar to many developers and thoroughly battle-tested.

Our py3compat module provided some more specific unicode conversions than those offered by six. If you want to use these, copy them into your own code from IPython 5.x. Do not rely on importing them from IPython, as the module may be removed in the future.