It's interesting that you get BAFFLE for the first one. I get the same result in both 3 and 2. Note first that the reason you get "BAϬ„E" is a bit of garbarge

It's interesting that you get BAFFLE for the first one. I get the same result in both 3 and 2. Note first that the reason you get "BAϬ„E" is a bit of garbarge-in garbage-out. Strangely, the interpreter isn't rejecting that with the typical "SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character <char> in file" error; instead, it appears to be assuming ISO-8859-1, and then performing .upper(). You can fix that: python2 -c '# coding: utf-8 print u"baffle".upper()' (Note, of course, that the #coding needs to match your terminals encoding, which is likely UTF-8, but it isn't guaranteed.) That, for me, prints "BAfflE" in both Python 2 and 3 (adjusting for 3 by adding parens around print, and removing the u prefix on the literal.) I'm on Python 3.2, so perhaps 3.3 does better. (I'm behind on updates, but last I did update, Gentoo stable was still on 3.2.)