Is there any good reason not to use unicode as opposed to string?

Question

Many problems I've ran into in Python have been related to not having something in Unicode. Is there any good reason to not use Unicode by default? I understand needing to translate something in ASCII, but it seems to be the exception and not the rule.

I know Python 3 uses Unicode for all strings. Should this encourage me as a developer to unicode() all my strings?

Answer 1

Generally, I'm going to say "no" there's not a good reason to use string over unicode. Remember, as well, that you don't have to call unicode() to create a unicode string, you can do so by prefixing the string with a lowercase u like u"this is a unicode string".

Answer 2

In Python 2.x:

• A str object is basically just a sequence of bytes.
• A unicode object is a sequence of characters.

Knowing this, it should be easy to choose the correct type:

• If you want a string of characters use unicode.
• If you want an string encoded as bytes use str (in many other languages you'd use byte[] here).

In Python 3.x the type str is a string of characters, just as you would expect. You can use bytes if you want a sequence of bytes.