Can I use cStringIO the same as StringIO?

Question

I did this:

import cStringIO.StringIO as StringIO

And I realize I\'ve been using it everywhere. Is that fine? Is it treated the same as String

Answer 1

They are not the same. cStringIO doesn't correctly handle unicode characters.

>>> StringIO.StringIO().write(u'\u0080')

>>> cStringIO.StringIO().write(u'\u0080')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\x80' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)