Newbie question about text encoding

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:20 AM, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:
> People who are asking for help in getting things to work in their
> native language need a 'do this quick' sort of answer.  The deeper
> problems of supporting all languages and language encodings can very
> much wait.

I'm not so sure about that. When "supporting all languages" is as
simple as "use Python 3 and UTF-8 everywhere", the cost is much lower
than it might be, and the benefit is potentially huge. A "do this
quick" answer might get you by *right now*, but it leaves open the
possibility of subtler errors. That's why Python moved to
Unicode-by-default, even though eight-bit encodings will tend to
produce the right results for simple text.

ChrisA