How to store ASCII encoded python string?

[micahc at gmail.com]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 3) convert the data to Unicode before passing it to the database
> interface, and leave it to the interface to convert it to whatever
> encoding your database uses:
>
>      data = ... get encoded string from email ...
>      text = data.decode("iso-8859-1")
>      ... write text to database ...

Wouldn't that have to assume that all incoming data is in iso-8859-1?
If someone sends me an email with chinese characters would that still
work (I don't know the character set at data insert time)?


Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote:
> In [6]: '\tsome text\xa7some more text\n'.encode('string_escape')
> Out[6]: '\\tsome text\\xa7some more text\\n'

Thanks, I think this is what I will end up doing just for simplicity,
though I'm still curious about the above question.