Hello, I've just noticed that in py3k, the decoding functions in the codecs module accept str objects as well as bytes: # import codecs # c = codecs.getdecoder('utf8') # c('aa') ('aa', 2) # c('éé') ('éé', 4) # c = codecs.getdecoder('latin1') # c('aa') ('aa', 2) # c('éé') ('éé', 4) Is it a bug? Regards Antoine.