Exactly this. The amount of times I saw juniors fixing thses sort of obscure subtle bugs with str_var.decode("utf-8").encode("latin-1") and this after attemptin

Exactly this. The amount of times I saw juniors fixing thses sort of obscure subtle bugs with str_var.decode("utf-8").encode("latin-1") and this after attempting every which combination of the above two de/encode operations is mind boggling.