portable unicode literals

[Ulrich Eckhardt]

Hi!

I need a little nudge in the right direction, as I'm misunderstanding 
something concerning string literals in Python 2 and 3. In Python 2.7, 
b'' and '' are byte strings, while u'' is a unicode literal. In Python 
3.2, b'' is a byte string and '' is a unicode literal, while u'' is a 
syntax error.

This actually came as a surprise to me, I assumed that using b'' I could 
portably create a byte string (which is true) and using u'' I could 
portably create a unicode string (which is not true). This feature would 
help porting code between both versions. While this is a state I can 
live with, I wonder what the rationale for this is.

!puzzled thanks

Uli