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.

Objects/unicodeobject.c

@@ -413,6 +413,7 @@ PyObject *PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject(register PyObject *obj,
     }
     else 
 	v = PyUnicode_Decode(s, len, encoding, errors);
+
  done:
     if (owned) {
 	Py_DECREF(obj);