unicode and strings

[Jacob Friis]

I'm trying to learn Python via Marks Feedparser.

<snip src="http://feedparser.org/docs/character-encoding.html">
If the character encoding can not be determined, Universal Feed Parser 
sets the bozo bit to 1 and sets bozo_exception to 
feedparser.CharacterEncodingUnknown. In this case, parsed values will be 
strings, not Unicode strings.
</snip>

I guess this means that all data will be unicode, and to put in a 
database I could use my mycode function. Correct?

def mycode(value):
	if isinstance(value, unicode):
		value = value.encode('utf-8')
	return value

What do I do about data that is a string?

Thanks,
Jacob