Funnily, because of the 2/3 transition, Python became a language obsessed with encoding correctness. Hence the team spent a great deal improving the situation,

Funnily, because of the 2/3 transition, Python became a language obsessed with encoding correctness. Hence the team spent a great deal improving the situation, from version to version during the last 10 years. For a fantastic read (from Victor Stinner himself) on all the work done and get how twisted this get when you want to be cross plateform and abstract it: https://vstinner.github.io/python37-new-utf8-mode.html https://vstinner.github.io/python37-new-utf8-mode.html Windows and Linux FS encoding, of course, are at the center of the challenge. It's also the reason why we now have a __fspath__ protocol that allows any object to be converted to a file system path instead of having pathlib.Path inheriting from string.