Python Essential Reference, Second 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 function unicode(s [, encoding [,errors ]]) 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 ...