character encoding conversion

[Steven Bethard]

Christian Ergh wrote:
> flag = true
> for char in data:
>     if 127 < ord(char) < 128:
>         flag = false
> if flag:
>     try:
>         data = data.encode('latin-1')
>     except:
>         pass

A little OT, but (assuming I got your indentation right[1]) this kind of 
loop is exactly what the else clause of a for-loop is for:

for char in data:
     if 127 < ord(char) < 128:
         break
else:
     try:
         data = data.encode('latin-1')
     except:
         pass

Only saves you one line of code, but you don't have to keep track of a 
'flag' variable.  Generally, I find that when I want to set a 'flag' 
variable, I can usually do it with a for/else instead.

Steve

[1] Messed up indentation happens in a lot of clients if you have tabs 
in your code.  If you can replace tabs with spaces before posting, this 
usually solves the problem.