This patch adds a new builtin unistr() which behaves like str()

except that it always returns Unicode objects.

A new C API PyObject_Unicode() is also provided.

This closes patch #101664.

Written by Marc-Andre Lemburg. Copyright assigned to Guido van Rossum.

Doc/lib/libfuncs.tex

@@ -694,6 +694,12 @@ to decode UTF-8 in strict mode, meaning that encoding errors raise
 \versionadded{2.0}
 \end{funcdesc}
 
+\begin{funcdesc}{unistr}{object}
+Return a Unicode string containing a nicely printable representation of an
+object.  For Unicode, this returns the Unicode string itself.  For
+all other objects, it tries to convert \code{str(\var{object})] to Unicode.
+\end{funcdesc}
+
 \begin{funcdesc}{vars}{\optional{object}}
 Without arguments, return a dictionary corresponding to the current
 local symbol table.  With a module, class or class instance object as