UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc6 in position 4: invalid continuation byte

attempting to pass in non-ASCII byte values will trigger UnicodeDecodeError.

use encode(), decode()

Each produces a value of a corresponding type that contains either bytes data (for encode() methods) or str data (for decode() methods).
python v3.2 : URL parsing functions now accept ASCII encoded byte sequences