There may not be a single encoding for every byte in a string. The encoding may not be knowable ahead of time. You might be trying to extract strings from a ran

There may not be a single encoding for every byte in a string. The encoding may not be knowable ahead of time. You might be trying to extract strings from a random blob of bytes with unknown origin. There's a thousand and one different variations. To give a real example, I once wrote some python scripts to parse serial messages coming off a bus. They'd read the messages, extract some values with regex, and move on. Unfortunately the bus had some electrical bugs and would intermittently flip random bits with no CRC to correct them. From my point of view, no big deal. If it's in something outside the fields I care about, I won't notice it. If it's flipped something I do care about we have a bad sample to drop or noise the signal processing will deal with. Either way, it's fine. Python on the other hand cared very much. I rewrote everything in C once I got sufficiently annoyed of dealing with it and more importantly explaining to others how they couldn't "simplify" things using the stdlib APIs.