>>> from __future__ import unicode_literals
>>> ipaddress.ip_address('1.2.3.4')
IPv4Address(u'1.2.3.4')

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(u'1.2.3.4')
IPv4Address(u'1.2.3.4')

>>> ipaddress.ip_address(b'1.2.3.4')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "ipaddress.py", line 163, in ip_address
    ' a unicode object?' % address)
ipaddress.AddressValueError: '1.2.3.4' does not appear to be an IPv4 or IPv6 address. Did you pass in a bytes (str in Python 2) instead of a unicode object?