[me] > >When *comparing* 8-bit and Unicode strings, the presence of non-ASCII > >bytes in either should make the comparison fail; when ordering is > >important, we can make an arbitrary choice e.g. "\377" < u"\200". [Toby] > I assume 'fail' means 'non-equal', rather than 'raises an exception'? Yes, sorry for the ambiguity. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)