Unicode vs UTF-8 confusion in Python / Django?

Question

I stumbled over this passage in the Django tutorial:

Django models have a default str() method that calls unicode()

Answer 1

From Wikipedia on UTF-8:

UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages[1], and other places where characters are stored or streamed.

So, it's anywhere between one and four bytes depending on which character you wish to represent within the realm of Unicode.

From Wikipedia on Unicode:

In computing, Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

So it's able to represent most (but not all) of the world's writing systems.

I hope this helps :)