But looking solely at python3 , everything byte and unicode related just got so much easier and better testable and with better error messages at better points in your code than in python 2.

So claiming python 3 broke stuff just not what the case is.

Python 2 had a deeply flawed, boundryless view of unicode vs bytes and python 3 fixed that.

What is your reason for using this obscure encoding anyway?

Yes and my entire point is that this makes zero sense when we're talking about escaping.

> What is your reason for using this obscure encoding anyway?

Seriously?

The encoding `unicode_escape` is not about escaping unicode characters. It's about python source code. It's defined as:

> Encoding suitable as the contents of a Unicode literal in ASCII-encoded Python source code, except that quotes are not escaped.

It makes absolutely no sense to have escaped unicode characters as actual unicode string. If you really need that, a version that also works in python 2 would be:

     u'hellö'.encode('unicode_escape').decode('ascii')

Absolutely no sense? So is a basic Python expression evaluator like this complete nonsense to you? #!/usr/bin/env python3

  try:  # Python 2
   from Tkinter import Tk, Entry, END
   import tkMessageBox as messagebox
  except ImportError:  # Python 3
   from tkinter import Tk, Entry, END, messagebox

  import ast
  def my_eval(s):
   # assume I've implemented this functionality manually...
   return ast.literal_eval(s)

  root = Tk()
  e = Entry(root)
  e.insert(END, '"Hell\\xc3\\xb6"')  # Assume the user typed has typed in a Python expression, not me
  e.pack()
  root.bind('<Return>', lambda evt: messagebox.showinfo("Result", repr(my_eval(e.get()))))
  root.mainloop()

Note that that wasn't even my choice! That was the choice of the built-in Python GUI toolkit... distributed by the same folks who decided this string/bytes overhaul was a brilliant idea...