unicode by default

[John Machin]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 8:51 am, harrismh777 wrote:
> Is it true that if I am
> working without using bytes sequences that I will not need to care about
> the encoding anyway, unless of course I need to specify a unicode code
> point?

Quite the contrary.

(1) You cannot work without using bytes sequences. Files are byte
sequences. Web communication is in bytes. You need to (know / assume / be
able to extract / guess) the input encoding. You need to encode your
output using an encoding that is expected by the consumer (or use an
output method that will do it for you).

(2) You don't need to use bytes to specify a Unicode code point. Just use
an escape sequence e.g. "\u0404" is a Cyrillic character.