[Python-Dev] Bytes path related questions for Guido

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > "purge_surrogate_escapes" was the other term that occurred to me.

"purge" suggests removal, not replacement.  That may be useful too.

neutralize_surrogate_escapes(s, remove=False, replacement='\uFFFD')

maybe?  (Of course the remove argument is feature creep, so I'm only
about +0.5 myself.  And the name is long, but I can't think of any
better synonyms for "make safe" in English right now).

 > Either way, my use case is to filter them out when I *don't* want to
 > pass them along to other software, but would prefer the Unicode
 > replacement character to the ASCII question mark created by using the
 > "replace" filter when encoding.

I think it would be preferable to be unicodely correct here by
default, since this is a str -> str function.