"Now, in Python 3, we finally have Unicode (utf-8) strings" This is not correct. Python strings are either ASCII, UCS-2 or UCS-4 depending on what code points

"Now, in Python 3, we finally have Unicode (utf-8) strings" This is not correct. Python strings are either ASCII, UCS-2 or UCS-4 depending on what code points they contain. Python 3 source code is by default UTF-8 and string literals are converted to the internal representation. You have to encode strings into UTF-8 bytes to actually get UTF-8 when executing the program.