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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:10:53+00:00

Is there any reason to prefer unicode(somestring, ‘utf8’) as opposed to somestring.decode(‘utf8’) ? My

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Is there any reason to prefer unicode(somestring, 'utf8') as opposed to somestring.decode('utf8')?

My only thought is that .decode() is a bound method so python may be able to resolve it more efficiently, but correct me if I’m wrong.

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  1. It’s easy to benchmark it:

    >>> from timeit import Timer >>> ts = Timer('s.decode('utf-8')', 's = 'ééé'') >>> ts.timeit() 8.9185450077056885 >>> tu = Timer('unicode(s, 'utf-8')', 's = 'ééé'')  >>> tu.timeit() 2.7656929492950439 >>>

    Obviously, unicode() is faster.

    FWIW, I don’t know where you get the impression that methods would be faster – it’s quite the contrary.

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