Jan, the codec implements an encoding which has certain characteristics just like any other codec. It works both in Python 2 and 3 without problems.

The documentation is no longer true, though. Ever since we added encoding markers to source files, the raw Unicode string literals depended on this encoding setting. Before this change the docs were fine, since Unicode literals were interpreted as Latin-1 encoded.

More correct would be: "Produce a string that uses Unicode escapes to encode non-Latin-1 code points. It is used in the Python pickle protocol."