formatyearpage is returning "bytes", not "str"

Python 3.0 (r30:67507, Dec  3 2008, 20:14:27) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win
32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import calendar
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009)[0:50]
b'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> type(calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009)[0:50])
<class 'bytes'>

# For the time being, to fix it I can use "decode"...
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009).decode("utf-8")[0:50]
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> type(calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009).decode("utf-8")[0:50])
<class 'str'>

This is the expected behavior; that's why the function takes an 
"encoding" argument. As it returns a complete XML document, it must be 
already encoded. Other methods return just document pieces, so str is 
fine. Probably should be better explained in the documentation.

It seems to be working consistently (see UTF-16 extreme example below),
but I had expected it to act similarly to Python 2.6, which it does not.
I suppose this is due to the distinction now made between strings and
bytes in Python 3.0.

I was initially concerned that Python 3.0 was always just giving an
ASCII byte stream no matter what encoding was chosen (since you can't
tell between ASCII and UTF-8 for the characters being used in the
example), but the UTF-16 example shows its fine.

I agree that as long as the documentation in Python 3.X notes it will
return "bytes", then its fine. Thanks for the clarification/confirmation.

Python 3.0 (r30:67507, Dec  3 2008, 20:14:27) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import calendar
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="utf-8")[0:50]
b'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="ascii")[0:50]
b'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ascii"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="utf-16")[0:50]
b'\xff\xfe<\x00?\x00x\x00m\x00l\x00
\x00v\x00e\x00r\x00s\x00i\x00o\x00n\x00=\x00"\x001\x00.\x000\x00"\x00
\x00e\x00n\x00c\x00o\x00'

Python 2.6.1 (r261:67517, Dec  4 2008, 16:51:00) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import calendar
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="utf-8")[0:50]
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="ascii")[0:50]
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ascii"?>\n<!DOCTYPE h'
>>> calendar.HTMLCalendar().formatyearpage(2009, encoding="utf-16")[0:50]
'\xff\xfe<\x00?\x00x\x00m\x00l\x00
\x00v\x00e\x00r\x00s\x00i\x00o\x00n\x00=\x00"\x001\x00.\x000\x00"\x00
\x00e\x00n\x00c\x00o\x00'

Closing, this is working as expected.