Look back a few posts. We're discussing using UTF-8 in str and avoiding the unicode type in Python 2. I'n my use case I validate the string as UTF-8 from the

Look back a few posts. We're discussing using UTF-8 in str and avoiding the unicode type in Python 2. I'n my use case I validate the string as UTF-8 from the internet. To and from the database is UTF-8 so no validation is required there. Output back to the internet requires no additional steps. Nowhere in this method is encode or decode required or desired.