Python 101: str() is dangerous for unicode objects without a specified encoding. Please don't call str() unless you know exactly what encoding you are dealing w

Python 101: str() is dangerous for unicode objects without a specified encoding. Please don't call str() unless you know exactly what encoding you are dealing with. Try it: $ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 python -c "print str(u'é')" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)