unicode_safe_127.py

import codecs

def unicode_safe_127(ss):
    """safely handle strings with hard ordinal values greater than 127
    by escaping each value as appropriate"""
    mys = ss
    tos=[]
    for i,s in enumerate(mys):
        if ord(s)>127:
            print codecs.unicode_escape_encode(mys)[0]
            tos.append(codecs.unicode_escape_encode(s)[0])
        else:
            tos.append(s)
    return  "".join(tos)