A Byte of Python

The repr function

The reprt function is used to obtain a canonical string representation of the object. Backticks (also called conversion or reverse quotes) do the same thing. Note that you will have eval(repr(object)) == object most of the time.

>>> i = []
>>> i.append('item')
>>> `i`
>>> repr(i)

Basically, the repr function or the backticks are used to obtain a printable representation of the object. you can control what your objects return for the repr function by defining the __repr__ method in your class.