&gt; Also, it&#x27;s incompatible with UTF-8 strings stored in C<p>That&#x27;s not true as of 3.3. It will store the compact representation, which in most cases is ASCII, which is UTF-8 compatible. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0393&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0393&#x2F;</a><p>So unless you go outside of UCS-1, you don&#x27;t need to reencode anything.