I'm a little confused. A unicode string stores a set of bytes internally and these bytes represent a set of characters. One character might need a number of bytes within this internal representation. An ascii string is the same idea except that only a single byte is needed to represent a character. But how do I know if a given variable stores a unicode or ascii string? Am I right in saying that if the get() function is given a unicode string as argument that it will return a unicode string? This wouldn't mean that my svd string is in ascii and my expressen string is in unicode and that doesn't make any sense to me. Please help!