Bytestring vs Unicodestring

FROM   http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10060411/byte-string-vs-unicode-string-python:

A character in a str represents one unicode character. However to represent more than 256 characters, individual unicode encodings use more than one byte per character to represent many characters. bytearray objects give you access to the underlaying bytes. str objects have the encode method that takes a string representing an encoding and returns the bytearray object that represents the string in that encoding. bytearray objects have the decode method that takes a string representing an encoding and returns the str that results from interpreting the bytearray as a string encoded in the the given encoding. Here's an example.

>>> a = "αά".encode('utf-8')
>>> a
b'\xce\xb1\xce\xac'
>>> a.decode('utf-8')
'αά'

We can see that UTF-8 is using four bytes, \xce, \xb1, \xce, and \xac to represent two characters. After the Spolsky article that Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams referred to, I would read the Python Unicode Howto.

以及干货：http://blog.csdn.net/chuanchuan608/article/details/17915959