Encoding questions

[Marc]

Hi,

Is there any way to see what encodings are installed on my computer,
or a reference of the encodings distributed with Python and what each
of them is for? I've looked at the reference for the codec module and
imagine there's a folder full of Codec classes somewhere; is this how
it works?

The specific problem I have is a Unicode file that contains a bullet
character (Unicode BULLET, 2022). Ultimately, it's going to be written
into a PDF file (via ReportLab). The default ASCII encoding doesn't
work, which is OK; suprisingly neither does 'latin-1', yet 'cp1252'
does work. These are just encodings I've seen somewhere. Basically,
I'd like to know how to go about choosing the best/most appropriate
encoding for a given application.

Thanks,
Marc Stober