Python: Essential Reference, Third Edition

Unicode Strings

The use of standard strings and Unicode strings in the same program presents a number of subtle complications. This is because such strings may be used in a variety of operations, including string concatenation, comparisons, dictionary key lookups, and as arguments to built-in functions.

To convert a standard string, s, to a Unicode string, the built-in unicode(s [, encoding [,errors]]) function is used. To convert a Unicode string, u, to a standard string, the string method u.encode([encoding [, errors]]) is used. Both of these conversion operators require the use of a special encoding rule that specifies how 16-bit Unicode character values are mapped to a sequence of 8-bit characters in standard strings, and vice versa. The ...