There's a lot of noise these days about Unicode nightmare in Python. I also have some trouble with that, it's good to know i'm not the only one ;) Anyway i attended a talk by Marc-André Lemburg at LSM 2005 about Unicode good practices in Python application development. It was very interesting, the slides are here_.

.. _here: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/LSM2005-Developing-Unicode-aware-applications-in-Python.pdf