There are two distinct questions here, to which implementations can provide different answers
1. Interface: How can I interact with "string" values, what kind of operations can I perform versus what can't be done ? Methods and Operators provided go here.
2. Representation: What is actually stored (in memory) ? Layout goes here.
So you may have understood (1) for Python, but you were badly off on (2). Now, at some level this doesn't matter, but, for performance obviously the choice of what you should do will depend on (2). Most obviously, if the language represents strings as UTF-8 bytes, then "encoding" a string as UTF-8 will be extremely cheap. Whereas, if the language represents them as UTF-16 code units, the UTF-8 encoding operation will be a little slower.
Alright, but don't leave us hanging: what does Python3 use for (2) that you say I was badly off on? (Or, in actuality, never thought about or meant to make claims about.) Now we still can't make good choices for performance!
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1838170/what-is-internal... says Python3.3 picks either a one-, two-, or four-byte representation depending on which is the smallest one that can represent all characters in a string. If you have one character in the string that requires >2 bytes to represent, it'll make every character take 4 bytes in memory such that you can have O(1) lookups on arbitrary offsets. The more you know :)
Pre-python 3.2, the format used for representing `str` objects in memory depended on if you used a "narrow" (UTF-16) or "wide" (UTF-32) build of Python.
Fortunately, wide and narrow builds were abandonned in Python 3.2, with a new way of representing strings : current Python will use ASCII if there's no non-ASCII char, UCS-2 –UTF-16 without surrogate pairs — if there is no codepoint higher than U+FFFF, and UTF-32 else.
Since Java 9, the Java JRE does something similar: if a string contains only characters in ISO-8859-1 then it is stored as such, else the usual storage format (int16) is used.
Yeah, I started writing about what you found (the answer to (2) for Python) and I realised that's a huge rabbit hole I was venturing down and decided to stop short and post, so, apologies I guess.
1. Interface: How can I interact with "string" values, what kind of operations can I perform versus what can't be done ? Methods and Operators provided go here.
2. Representation: What is actually stored (in memory) ? Layout goes here.
So you may have understood (1) for Python, but you were badly off on (2). Now, at some level this doesn't matter, but, for performance obviously the choice of what you should do will depend on (2). Most obviously, if the language represents strings as UTF-8 bytes, then "encoding" a string as UTF-8 will be extremely cheap. Whereas, if the language represents them as UTF-16 code units, the UTF-8 encoding operation will be a little slower.