I know this has been discussed before. In light of the recent PEP8 update: Avoid the use of the string module; instead use string methods. These are always much faster and share the same API with unicode strings. I thought I'd raise it again. How about deprecating the string module? In the past, this has presented two major problems. First, its near ubiquity in Python programs before the availability of string methods. Second, the presence of a few useful data objects (digits, uppercase, etc). The first problem can be solved by extending the deprecation time suitably (two years/four releases?) I think the second problem can be solved by adding those data objects to either sys or locale(preferably the latter). string.letters and its subsets are locale-dependent. In relevant locales I presume string.punctuation and string.whitespace would also be different than their common ASCII elements. Finally, I'd amend the above PEP8 admontion something like Avoid the use of the string module unless backward-compatibility with versions earlier than Python 2.0 is important; instead use string methods. These are always much faster and share the same API with unicode strings. Skip