The result of time.strftime seems to be in the locale encoding
but this is not pointed out in the documentation.

Ideally an example like this would be in the docs to show how to
deal with strftime output:

import locale
import time

locale_encoded_time = time.strftime( '%d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S' )

language, encoding = locale.getdefaultlocale()
unicode_time = locale_encoded_time.decode( encoding )

Victor, this is your chance to add French to Python docs!

Added to Docs that strftime will return a locale dependent byte string.

This may help: http://blog.codekills.net/2013/04/13/strftime--table-of-locale-aware-formatters-in-different-locales/

It may also be worth noting that the strftime formatters table now includes examples from different locales: https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior

This change was introduced about a year ago.

New changeset 31adcc4c4391 by R David Murray in branch '2.7':
#5904: Add sentence about the encoding of strftime's result.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/31adcc4c4391

Thanks, Caelyn.  I used your patch but added a clause showing explicitly how do the unicode conversion.  I decided to not add that to the datetime, docs, since they are already pretty clear.