Not at all, it forces you to unify to storing character data as Unicode code-points. Eventually if you go down far enough, you&#x27;re reading the raw bytes you speak of from some sort of external system&#x2F;file&#x2F;DB. It&#x27;s at that point that you define your encoding, and never worry about it every again. Except for when you touch those external systems&#x2F;files again, again with full knowledge about what encoding is required.<p>Either way, if you&#x27;re not dealing with differently encoded character data in Python 2.x as noted above, you&#x27;re causing yourself some unnecessary headaches.