No, I would not. To stay with your problematic analogy that differently encoded strings are to each other what integers are to strings: Would you write a funct

No, I would not. To stay with your problematic analogy that differently encoded strings are to each other what integers are to strings: Would you write a function, that takes either a string or an integer and returns therefor either a string or an integer, so you can not feed the output of this first function into a second function, that is often called after the first, but can only take integers? Or would you rather say "Okay, we are working with numbers here, lets just take and return integers in this module."? You can read more about this here: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/ http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/