I'm -1 on this. Just type "0431 unicode" on your favorite search engine. U+0431 is the codepoint, not whatever digits 0x431 has in decimal. That's a tradition and something external to Python. As a related concern, I think using decimal/octal on raw data is a terrible idea (e.g. On Linux, I always have to re-format the "cmp -l" to really grasp what's going on, changing it to hexadecimal). Decimal notation is hardly readable when we're dealing with stuff designed in base 2 (e.g. due to the visual separation of distinct bytes). How many people use "hexdump" (or any binary file viewer) with decimal output instead of hexadecimal? I agree that mixing representations for the same abstraction (using decimal in some places, hexadecimal in other ones) can be a bad idea. Actually, that makes me believe "decimal unicode codepoint" shouldn't ever appear in string representations. -- Danilo J. S. Bellini --------------- "*It is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions.*" (R. Carnap)