unicode and byte strings so farour exploration of strings in this book has been deliberately incomplete ' types preview briefly introduced python' unicode strings and files without giving many detailsand the strings in the core types part of this book (deliberately limited its scope to the subset of string topics that most python programmers need to know about this was by designbecause many programmersincluding most beginnersdeal with simple forms of text like asciithey can happily work with python' basic str string type and its associated operations and don' need to come to grips with more advanced string concepts in factsuch programmers can often ignore the string changes in python and continue to use strings as they may have in the past on the other handmany other programmers deal with more specialized types of datanon-ascii character setsimage file contentsand so on for those programmersand others who may someday join themin this we're going to fill in the rest of the python string story and look at some more advanced concepts in python' string model specificallywe'll explore the basics of python' support for unicode text--rich character strings used in internationalized applications--as well as binary data--strings that represent absolute byte values as we'll seethe advanced string representation story has diverged in recent versions of pythonpython provides an alternative string type for binary dataand supports unicode text (including asciiin its normal string type python provides an alternative string type for non-ascii unicode textand supports both simple text and binary data in its normal string type in additionbecause python' string model has direct impact on how you process non-ascii fileswe'll explore the fundamentals of that related topic here as well finallywe'll take brief look at some advanced string and binary toolssuch as pattern matchingobject picklingbinary data packingand xml parsingand the ways in which they are impacted by ' string changes