Actually browser normalized string and it works for me also. Here is original byte sequence: >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode() 'ñ' >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode(

Actually browser normalized string and it works for me also. Here is original byte sequence: >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode() 'ñ' >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode()[0] 'n' >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode()[1] '̃' But I agree, it's rare case when you need to deal with non-normalized data.