In the Unicode HOWTO: http://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/unicode.html

It says the following:


"UTF-8 has several convenient properties:
(...)
2. A Unicode string is turned into a sequence of bytes containing no embedded zero bytes. This avoids byte-ordering issues, and means UTF-8 strings can be processed by C functions such as strcpy() and sent through protocols that can’t handle zero bytes."

This is not right.  UTF-8 uses the zero byte to represent the Unicode codepoint U+0000 (the ASCII NULL character).  This is a valid character in UTF-8 and is handled just fine by python's UTF-8 string encoding/decoding.