The hex stuff is binascii.hexlify(). But I agree with you and with Armin; removing string -> string and unicode -> unicode encodings and decodings were a mista

The hex stuff is binascii.hexlify(). But I agree with you and with Armin; removing string -> string and unicode -> unicode encodings and decodings were a mistake. I said as much when the discussions about Python 3 and codecs were going on ~5 years ago.