> It would be good to hear a strong argument from
> the user that how did he end up passing
> unicode to shlex.split? It is for parsing command
> line args for programs and personally have not
> seen those cases.

 I'm from Spain: I personally write programs and python/bash scripts that accept unicode input arguments. And I'm currently writing a wxpython gui program (SSH/rdesktop launcher, in Spanish) that needs (and cannot) do shlex.split in of a given text string.

 Remember that English is NOT the most spoken language on the world. It's the THIRD most spoken language, after Chinese and Spanish, languages that need and use unicode support.