Comment by saurik

...or you could just use the unicode type in Python 2; like: all of my Python 2 software handled languages in other character sets correctly (and yes: this was stress tested often as I have had many many users from China and the Middle East). There was absolutely nothing wrong with Python 2 and Unicode, and if anything Python 3 just made a bunch of stuff impossible to do correctly (in particular encodings for filenames) until years later (I think Python 3.4 or something is when they finally got their Unicode shit together; meanwhile, Python 2 worked great).