Which, to humor the parent, is also true of raw bytes strings. One of the (valid) points raised by the gist is that `str` is not infallibly encodable to UTF-8, since it can contain values that are not valid Unicode.
> This also allows you to work with strings that contain arbitrary data falling outside of the unicode spectrum.
If I write,
def foo(s: str) -> …:
def foo(s: UnicodeWithBullshit) -> …:It's a common mistake. A lot of code was written using str despite users needing it to operate on UnicodeWithBullshit. PEP 383 was a necessary escape hatch to fix countless broken programs.
No, nothing about the "string" type in python implies unicode. It's, for all intents and purposes, its own encoding, and should be treated as such. Not all encodings it can convert to are representable as unicode, and vice versa, so it makes no sense to think of it as unicode.
But most programmers think in arrays of grapheme clusters, whether they know it or not.