Why does the "".join(r) do this?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Jim> I'm building up a web page by stuffing an array and then doing
    Jim> "".join(r) at the end.  I intend to later encode it as 'latin1', so
    Jim> I'd like it to just concatenate.  While I can work around this
    Jim> error, the reason for it escapes me.

Try 

    u"".join(r)

instead.  I think the join operation is trying to convert the Unicode bits
in your list of strings to strings by encoding using the default codec,
which appears to be ASCII.

Skip