The repr function is used to obtain a canonical string representation of the object. Backticks (also called conversion or reverse quotes) does the same thing. Note that you will have eval(repr(object)) == object most of the time.
>>> i = 5 >>> `i` '5' >>> repr(i) '5' >>>
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.