I am creating flow variables in python nodes that contain metadata information associated with a microarray. I am trying to pull this information from a database, convert it to a flow variable, and then pass the flow variables in functions that are used later on in the workflow. However, when I create the flow variables from the dataframes it is converting the numbers to unicode format, which cannot be passed in the functions in python I created.
Is there any easy way to convert unicode back to ascii? Or is there a way to prevent KNIME from converting things to unicode?