Tim Peters writes:

A Unicode string is, at least in theory, a sequence of Unicode characters, the latter defined in excruciating detail by the Unicode Consortium. There's no conventional sense in which a Unicode string is an encoding of something other than exactly itself, but you could certainly make one up.

I, for one, have always preferred to interpret a string as it's rot-13 equivalent. "import this; this.s" -lly yours, Michael Chermside This email may contain confidential or privileged information. If you believe you have received the message in error, please notify the sender and delete the message without copying or disclosing it.