* Replace all basestring references with unicode
`basestring` was a compatability type introduced by Cython to make
dealing with utf-8 strings in Python2 easier. In Python3 it is
equivalent to the unicode (or str) type.
I replaced all references to basestring with unicode, since that was
used elsewhere, but we could also just replace them with str, which
shoudl also be equivalent.
All tests pass locally.
* Replace all references to unicode type with str
Since we only support python3 this is simpler.
* Remove all references to unicode type
This removes all references to the unicode type across the codebase and
replaces them with `str`, which makes it more drastic than the prior
commits. In order to make this work importing `unicode_literals` had to
be removed, and one explicit unicode literal also had to be removed (it
is unclear why this is necessary in Cython with language level 3, but
without doing it there were errors about implicit conversion).
When `unicode` is used as a type in comments it was also edited to be
`str`.
Additionally `coding: utf8` headers were removed from a few files.
A long time ago we went to some trouble to try to clean up "unused"
strings, to avoid the `StringStore` growing in long-running processes.
This never really worked reliably, and I think it was a really wrong
approach. It's much better to let the user reload the `nlp` object as
necessary, now that the string encoding is stable (in v1, the string IDs
were sequential integers, making reloading the NLP object really
annoying.)
The extra book-keeping does make some performance difference, and the
feature is unsed, so it's past time we killed it.
Paul O'Leary McCann