External encoding: what it reads and writes from and to files Internal encoding: what the strings are encoded in memory (latin1/UCS2/UCS4 in python) Secondary

External encoding: what it reads and writes from and to files Internal encoding: what the strings are encoded in memory (latin1/UCS2/UCS4 in python) Secondary buffer: python strings can be encoded twice. They can hold a secondary encoded version if themselves as utf-8.