Should I use Unicode string by default?

Question

Is it considered as a good practice to pick Unicode string over regular string when coding in Python? I mainly work on the Windows platform, where most of the string types are U

Answer 1

As you ask this question, I suppose you are using Python 2.x.

Python 3.0 changed quite a lot in string representation, and all text now is unicode.
I would go for unicode in any new project - in a way compatible with the switch to Python 3.0 (see details).