points_to_take

*** Use unicode when dealing with text inside the program
*** When writing to file, always explicitly encode unicode
*** When reading from file, always decode to unicode first
----> decode early, always use unicode, encode late

*** Encode unicode using utf-8 (the most common encoding)

*** When mixing unicode + bytes, bytes are implicitly converted to unicode:
    a) if bytes are ASCII, works
    b) if bytes are non-ASCII, fails

Futher good read:
 https://bitbucket.org/ezio_melotti/understanding-encodings
 http://wolfprojects.altervista.org/talks/unicode-and-python-3/