Dealing with string encoding has always been the bane of my existence in Python...going back over 10 years when I first started using it. I've never had such wi

Dealing with string encoding has always been the bane of my existence in Python...going back over 10 years when I first started using it. I've never had such wild issues with decoding/encoding in other languages...that may be my privilege, though, since I was dealing with internal systems before Python, and then I got into web scraping. Regardless, string encoding/decoding in Python is hard, and it doesn't feel like it needs to be.