How do I check if a string is unicode or ascii?

In Python 3, all strings are sequences of Unicode characters. There is a bytes type that holds raw bytes.

In Python 2, a string may be of type str or of type unicode. You can tell which using code something like this:

def whatisthis(s):
    if isinstance(s, str):
        print "ordinary string"
    elif isinstance(s, unicode):
        print "unicode string"
    else:
        print "not a string"

This does not distinguish "Unicode or ASCII"; it only distinguishes Python types. A Unicode string may consist of purely characters in the ASCII range, and a bytestring may contain ASCII, encoded Unicode, or even non-textual data.

How to tell if an object is a unicode string or a byte string

You can use type or isinstance.

In Python 2:

>>> type(u'abc')  # Python 2 unicode string literal
<type 'unicode'>
>>> type('abc')   # Python 2 byte string literal
<type 'str'>

In Python 2, str is just a sequence of bytes. Python doesn't know what its encoding is. The unicode type is the safer way to store text. If you want to understand this more, I recommend http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/.

In Python 3:

>>> type('abc')   # Python 3 unicode string literal
<class 'str'>
>>> type(b'abc')  # Python 3 byte string literal
<class 'bytes'>

In Python 3, str is like Python 2's unicode, and is used to store text. What was called str in Python 2 is called bytes in Python 3.

How to tell if a byte string is valid utf-8 or ascii

You can call decode. If it raises a UnicodeDecodeError exception, it wasn't valid.

>>> u_umlaut = b'\xc3\x9c'   # UTF-8 representation of the letter 'Ü'
>>> u_umlaut.decode('utf-8')
u'\xdc'
>>> u_umlaut.decode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Unicode is not an encoding - to quote Kumar McMillan:

If ASCII, UTF-8, and other byte strings are "text" ...

...then Unicode is "text-ness";

it is the abstract form of text

Have a read of McMillan's Unicode In Python, Completely Demystified talk from PyCon 2008, it explains things a lot better than most of the related answers on Stack Overflow.

If your code needs to be compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3, you can't directly use things like isinstance(s,bytes) or isinstance(s,unicode) without wrapping them in either try/except or a python version test, because bytes is undefined in Python 2 and unicode is undefined in Python 3.

There are some ugly workarounds. An extremely ugly one is to compare the name of the type, instead of comparing the type itself. Here's an example:

# convert bytes (python 3) or unicode (python 2) to str
if str(type(s)) == "<class 'bytes'>":
    # only possible in Python 3
    s = s.decode('ascii')  # or  s = str(s)[2:-1]
elif str(type(s)) == "<type 'unicode'>":
    # only possible in Python 2
    s = str(s)

An arguably slightly less ugly workaround is to check the Python version number, e.g.:

if sys.version_info >= (3,0,0):
    # for Python 3
    if isinstance(s, bytes):
        s = s.decode('ascii')  # or  s = str(s)[2:-1]
else:
    # for Python 2
    if isinstance(s, unicode):
        s = str(s)

Those are both unpythonic, and most of the time there's probably a better way.