About unicode and str in Python.

unistr.py

# unicode => human readable format
uni_text = u'café'
print type(uni_text)
print isinstance(uni_text, str)
print len(uni_text)
uni_str_convert = uni_text.encode('UTF-8')

# str => bytes
str_text = 'café'
print type(str_text)
print isinstance(str_text, unicode)
print len(str_text)
str_uni_convert = str_text.decode('UTF-8')

# comparisons
print uni_str_convert == uni_text
print uni_str_convert == str_text

print str_uni_convert == uni_text
print str_uni_convert == str_text