unicode by default

[John Machin]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 1:44 pm, harrismh777 wrote:
> By
> default it looks like Python3 is writing output with UTF-8 as default...
> and I thought that by default Python3 was using either UTF-16 or UTF-32.
> So, I'm confused here...  also, I used the character sequence \u00A3
> which I thought was UTF-16... but Python3 changed my intent to  'c2a3'
> which is the normal UTF-8...

Python uses either a 16-bit or a 32-bit INTERNAL representation of Unicode
code points. Those NN bits have nothing to do with the UTF-NN encodings,
which can be used to encode the codepoints as byte sequences for EXTERNAL
purposes. In your case, UTF-8 has been used as it is the default encoding
on your platform.