unicode_safe_127.py

import codecs

def unicode_safe_127(ss, debug=False):
    """safely handle strings with have ordinal values greater than 127
    by escaping each value as appropriate.
    if debug=True, log each conversion to stderr
    """
    mys = ss
    tos=[]
    for i,s in enumerate(mys):
        if ord(s)>127:
            if debug:
                sys.stderr.write(codecs.unicode_escape_encode(mys)[0] + "\n")
            tos.append(codecs.unicode_escape_encode(s)[0])
        else:
            tos.append(s)
    return  "".join(tos)