Wrong. UTF-16 is an encoding, Unicode is the abstract representation. You can encode Unicode strings into UTF-16, but that doesn't make UTF-16 Unicode. Python's

Wrong. UTF-16 is an encoding, Unicode is the abstract representation. You can encode Unicode strings into UTF-16, but that doesn't make UTF-16 Unicode. Python's Unicode strings are actually really just Unicode, that's why you can't write them to a file or anything - you need to encode them first (which defaults to UTF-8).