> (Note: Personally I would love to have str always represented internally in UTF-8. If it were like this, I would say "cast" was acceptable vocabulary. But it'

> (Note: Personally I would love to have str always represented internally in UTF-8. If it were like this, I would say "cast" was acceptable vocabulary. But it's not like this). UTF-8 is a good choice for transmission and storage, but since it's somewhat difficult to decode and isn't easily seekable it's not necessarily the best in-memory representation of a string. Fortunately, that's, from a Python PoV, an implementation detail (even at the C API level). > By the way, I never needed this. str() is just a convenience function, it's not meant for reliability. As you surely know there is complex interplay with __str__ and __repr__. I use str() for debugging, error message etc. But not for anything that I expect to be able to process further. Or log messages. Broadly speaking str() means "tell the object to describe itself", while repr() means "tell the object to describe itself, possibly in a way that I can eval() it"