Strange behaviour while splitting string?

[naknak12]

Can somebody explain why this is happening? I'm only getting this while executing this in python2.7.
See code below.

1 2	data = "ëeêfdsf" print data[:3]

Expected output: ëeê
Current output: ëe

[snippsat]

Put u in front u"ëeêfdsf".
Stop using Python 2,it's dead in the end of this year.

Unicode was one biggest changes moving to Python 3.
In Python 3 is all text Unicode bye default.
Python 3.7:

1 2 3 4 5

>>> data = "ëeêfdsf" >>> data 'ëeêfdsf' >>> data[:3] 'ëeê'

Python 2.7:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

>>> data = "ëeêfdsf" >>> data '\xc3\xabe\xc3\xaafdsf' >>> data[:3] '\xc3\xabe' >>> print(data[:3]) ëe >>> print(data[:3].decode('utf-8')) ëe >>> data = u"ëeêfdsf" >>> print(data[:3]) ëeê

[naknak12]

Thank you for your well explained examples.