Unicode: a bad idea, in general

[Mason]

@moble

I hesitate to add my two cents, for all the derision I’m sure to attract for going overboard, but personally I come down very strongly on the side of using UTF-8 in my own code, while ensuring that the API allows people to use either UTF-8 or ASCII.

You shouldn’t hesitate. I think your opinion is the majority opinion here. Unicode is good, but there should be non-unicode API options available, and your method of defining both ASCII and unicode kwargs simultaneously is clever and worth sharing.