Hard disagree, there's plenty to complain about with python strings but drawing a formal distinction between str and bytes is one of the smartest things they di

Hard disagree, there's plenty to complain about with python strings but drawing a formal distinction between str and bytes is one of the smartest things they did for the language. It made the transition from 2->3 a huge PITA but it's one of the things that forces you two write better code. You have to actually acknowledge when you're doing an encoding/decoding step and what encoding you expect. Python3 caught a programming error for you and you're mad about it. The traceback you got was an encoded form (bytes) that you were blinding decoding in ascii when it was in fact UTF-8. You can tell it to truck through with surrogateescape but surely you can agree that it would be insane to make that the default.