Apparently you don&#x27;t deal with much non-ascii data if you don&#x27;t like python3&#x27;s string handling. It&#x27;s literally the reason I first upgraded, because reading in simple text data on Python2 can break completely. Seeing as literally no language on earth can be written entirely in ascii characters (since even English text can contain words with accents or old fashioned things like the long s ſ) this is a pretty big issue.<p>Yes it is possibly to laboriously add code to check and encode&#x2F;decode text, that might sometime be text and sometimes binary pretending to be text pretending to be binary. But why go through that pain when you could just use Python3 where things are clear and generally actually work.