Off topic: Proper, consistent and through UTF-8 support is one of the various reasons I'm starting to prefer Go to Pytho. It is sad that Python 3 didn't take the opportunity to properly fix this.
I thought Python3 sort-of did fix it, by forcing strings to be (abstractly) unicode and force you to explicit convert them to bytes with whichever codec you want (e.g. utf-8) when you need to.
What are you missing?