Please see the correction from Cliff pasted here after this excerpt. Tim > the byte string is ASCII which is a subset of Unicode (IS0-8859-1 > isn't).)
The one comment I'd make is that ASCII and ISO-8859-1 are both subsets of Unicode, (which relates to the abstract code-points) but ASCII is also a subset of UTF-8, on the bytestream level, while ISO-8859 is not a subset of UTF-8, nor, as far as I can tell, any other unicode *encoding*. Thus a file encoded in ascii *is* in fact a utf-8 file. There is no way to distinguish the two. But an ISO-8859-1 file is not the same (on the bytestream level) as a file with identical content in UTF-8 or any other unicode encoding. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
