read(1) returns string of length 2

[George Yoshida]

wolfgang haefelinger wrote:

> Actually,  everything is fine until the codecs reader is about
> to read '3b'. Instead of delivering this as next unicode char,
> I'm getting '3b' and '0d' as string of length 2.

I tried this out with Python 2.3 and 2.4 and noticed that they
handle input streams differently.
With 2.4 I get the same result as Java:

   0x5408 0x8a08 0x6642 0x9593 0x3b 0xd 0xa

(There's no {} marks.)

This makes me wonder where the difference comes from?
Is this a bug in 2.3 or a new feature in 2.4?

-- george