> Additionally, your advice is broken. Take a look at this example, with the shelve module (from standard library). His advice was sound, and referred to your

> Additionally, your advice is broken. Take a look at this example, with the shelve module (from standard library). His advice was sound, and referred to your example of TCP stream data (which is binary). Your example regards the shelve library. > So in this case, my byte string can't be used as a key here, apparently. shelve requires strings as a keys. This is documented, though not particularly clearly. > so your advice about "just using byte strings" is invalid. Let me attempt to rephrase his advice. Use bytestrings where your data is a string of bytes. Use strings where your data is human-readable text. Covert to and from bytestrings when serializing to something like network or storage. > Conversions are inevitable. Absolutely, because bytestrings and (text)strings are two different types. > And this annoys me. There is no real alternative though, because there is no way to automatically convert between the two. Python 2 made many assumptions, and these were often invalid and led to bugs. Python 3 does not; in places where it does not have the required information, you must provide it. > when implementing existing protocols, or reading file formats that don't use Unicode. I'm afraid it's still the same. A protocol that uses unicode requires you to code something like "decode('utf-8')" (if UTF-8 is what it uses), one that does not requires "decode('whatever-it-uses-instead')". If it isn't clear what encoding the file format or protocol stores textual data in, then that's a bug with the file format or protocol, not Python. Regardless though, Python doesn't know (and can't know) what encoding the file or protocol uses.