[1] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#text-... [2] http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/howto/unicode.html

One of my favorite things about Python 3 is its new string handling. It is fantastic and marginally more intuitive. Having an explicit (and a more general) immutable `bytes` class, no longer sharing a base class with `unicode`, and having Unicode instead of a potentially-encoded string as the default are all wonderful decisions and moves Python forward by miles in my opinion.

Until Python 3 becomes the norm, we're still stuck with the confusing `str` and `unicode` constructs.

Also, I think http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html may be a better reference than this article.

    $ python3
    Python 3.2.2 (default, Nov 21 2011, 05:01:42)
    [GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
    information.
    >>> print('hello world') # <-- Unicode!

# -- coding: utf-8 --

Does Python actually parse comments, or is this just to get your editor to do the right thing?

  # -*- coding: latin-1 -*-

http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html

  # vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 

See: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/

    def utf8(value):
        if isinstance(value, unicode):
            return value.encode("utf-8")
        assert isinstance(value, str)
        return value

    def _unicode(value):
        if isinstance(value, str):
            return value.decode("utf-8")
        assert isinstance(value, unicode)
        return value