Binary strings, unicode and encodings

[Laurent Therond]

Peter, thank you for taking the time to answer.

I will need some time to digest this information.

>From where I stand, a Python newbie who knows more about Java, this
concept of binary string is puzzling. I wish Python dealt in Unicode
natively, as Java does. It makes things a lot easier to comprehend.
Having strings be byte arrays, on the other, seems to confuse me.