In the datetime docs, there's a Technical Detail note that seems to say that strftime() will return an encoded string (i.e. bytes), but actually it returns a Unicode string as of Python 3.0 (i.e. str).

1. Because the format depends on the current locale, care should be taken when making assumptions about the output value. Field orderings will vary (for example, “month/day/year” versus “day/month/year”), and the output may contain Unicode characters encoded using the locale’s default encoding (for example, if the current locale is ja_JP, the default encoding could be any one of eucJP, SJIS, or utf-8; use locale.getlocale() to determine the current locale’s encoding).

(I jumped the gun by submitting a PR for this (#93365) before an issue.)

• PR: gh-99032: datetime docs: Encoding is no longer relevant #93365

• PR: [3.11] gh-99032: datetime docs: Encoding is no longer relevant (GH-93365) #103788