> `str` are sequence of unicode codepoints [...] without reference to any encoding
I guess I see it from the programmer's perspective: to handle bytes coming from the disk/network as a string, I need to specify an encoding, so they are (to me) byte sequences with an encoding assigned. Didn't realize strings don't have an encoding in Python's internal string handling but are, instead, something like an array of integers pointing to unicode code points. Not sure if this viewpoint means I am getting it backwards but I can see how that was phrased poorly on my part!
I guess I see it from the programmer's perspective: to handle bytes coming from the disk/network as a string, I need to specify an encoding, so they are (to me) byte sequences with an encoding assigned. Didn't realize strings don't have an encoding in Python's internal string handling but are, instead, something like an array of integers pointing to unicode code points. Not sure if this viewpoint means I am getting it backwards but I can see how that was phrased poorly on my part!