[Bill Janssen]
While we're talking about this, Martin, what is the encoding of the "string" returned by
struct.pack("bbb", 0xFF, 0x00, 0x83)
That raises an exception. Did you intend "BBB" as the format string?
And what should it be?
Whatever you explicitly say it is, when you feed the string to a context that requires knowing the intended encoding. It has no intrinsic encoding -- encoding is in your head (or your app's requirements), not in the string itself. It's like asking which numeric base the sequence of digits 1111 is written in. You can't tell by staring it at. Maybe that was decimal, maybe it was binary. But no -- I actually had base 2004 in mind <wink>. Here are two distinct possibilities for your specific string:
s = struct.pack("BBB", 0xFF, 0x00, 0x83) unicode(s, 'latin1') u'\xff\x00\x83' unicode(s, 'cp1252') u'\xff\x00\u0192'
Python can't guess the intent. Neither could a highly knowledgeable but non-telepathic human, for that matter.