

Python, Unicode and UnicodeDecodeError - zeynel1
http://www.stereoplex.com/blog/python-unicode-and-unicodedecodeerror

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Yaggo
Good technical summary. I would like to point out couple of things:

1) Most (if any?) Western Europeans does not use ASCII. (UK being an
exception.)

2) There are no reason to use ASCII if your program handles any kind of
textual input. Not even English can be properly represented by ACII, because
it can contain foreign names, brands, loan-words etc. with non-ASCII
characters. ASCII with its arbitrary 7-bit limit was invented in 1960 when
computer resources were extremely limited. Always deploy Unicode, whether your
application is English-only or not.

