I haven't been following this discussion closely at all, and have no previous experience with Unicode, so please pardon a couple stupid questions from the peanut gallery: 1. What does U+0061 mean (other than 'a')? That is, what is U? 2. I saw nothing about encodings in the Codec/StreamReader/StreamWriter description. Given a Unicode object with encoding e1, how do I write it to a file that is to be encoded with encoding e2? Seems like I would do something like u1 = unicode(s, encoding=e1) f = open("somefile", "wb") u2 = unicode(u1, encoding=e2) f.write(u2) Is that how it would be done? Does this question even make sense? 3. What will the impact be on programmers such as myself currently living with blinders on (that is, writing in plain old 7-bit ASCII)? Thx, Skip Montanaro | http://www.mojam.com/ skip@mojam.com | http://www.musi-cal.com/ 847-971-7098 | Python: Programming the way Guido indented...