David Binger  wrote:
> >>> str(h8(u'\u1234'))
> '\xe1\x88\xb4'
> (this is the utf8 encoding of \u1234.)

Do you sliently decode too?  IOW, what does,

    h8('\xe1\x88\xb4')

produce?  I guess that's convenient but it would make encoding bugs
very difficult to find.

   Neil