KvS wrote: >>>> s=u"\u0040\u0166\u00e6" >>>> s > u'@\u0166\xe6' > > (does this latter \xe6 have to do with the internal representation of > unic. objects, maybe with this UCS-2 encoding?) no, it's simply the shortest way to represent U+00E6 as Python Unicode string literal, when limited to ASCII only. </F>