I'm fairly sure I'm handling strings correctly under Python 2. What I'm not sure of is the risk of something breaking if I upgrade to Python 3, especially when it comes to upgrading external dependencies. Even if it's just non-backwards compatible API changes, it's more risk to deal with.
You're fairly certain, but with Python 3 you can be completely certain. That's the magic of it.
Python 2 will allow this to sometimes work, Python 3 will make sure this never works, because there's a bytes/text mismatch. It's nice to rule out entire classes of bugs like this
from sys import argv
import json
with open(argv[1], 'rb') as f:
json.loads(f.read())
Porting is still difficult. But when we ported from Py2 to Py3, we found a couple issues like this (despite dealing with weird encodings all the time).
