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IMO it is a fact that the characters used by human languages are stored as bytes by computers, so a programmer needs to know the basics about text handling and encoding. I don’t like the idea of a built-in function helping people to put their hands on their ears and sing "la-la-la everything is ASCII". I know that it is hard to find oneself confronted with a UnicodeDecodeError, I’ve been there, but then I learned. My hope is that good explanations in the FAQ, howto and library ref (with good PageRank, so that people googling error messages find us) can help people understand how to work with text.
That said, I’m going to re-read Armin’s post about Python 3 and Nick’s reply to it to understand your position better.
can’t-put-my-damn-name-in-so-many-websites-in-2012-grumble’ly yours