What you see on the screen of a terminal is Unicode strings. It is human readable text. len(“”) is 3 even if the underlying encoding holds it as 6 bytes. Of co

What you see on the screen of a terminal is Unicode strings. It is human readable text. len(“”) is 3 even if the underlying encoding holds it as 6 bytes. Of course if you provide a separate set of functions for treating a string as human readable vs not you can also work with that. Basically len() vs byte_len(). But you can’t concat two human readable strings without ensuring they are of the same encoding. You can’t search a string by bytes if your needle is of a different encoding. You can’t sort without taking encoding and locale preferences into account, etc. Pretending like you don’t care about encoding doesn’t work as we have seen time and again.