On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:25:30AM +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> If we were following you, we would add "encoding" and "errors"
> arguments to any str-accepting 2.x function, so that it can also
> accept unicode strings. That's certainly not a reasonable solution.

I don't think Matt is indicating that. Just the quote function can be
used with unicode string as perfectly valid string input.
In the original py3k bug too, there was a big discussion on this very
same topic.