string.translate with unicode

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

peterbe at gmail.com:

It's not a bug, but such incompatibility problem will probably be
solved with Python 3.0,  when most strings will managed as unicode.

The documentation says:
>it returns a copy of the s where all characters have been mapped through the given translation table which must be a mapping of Unicode ordinals to Unicode ordinals, Unicode strings or None. Unmapped characters are left untouched. Characters mapped to None are deleted.<

An example:

def maketransU(s1, s2, todel=""):
    trans_tab = dict( zip( map(ord, s1), map(ord, s2) ) )
    trans_tab.update( (ord(c),None) for c in todel )
    return trans_tab

trans_tab_u = maketransU('_', ' ', "?&!;<=>*#[]{}")

print u"Peter!_*fine*".translate(trans_tab_u)

Bye,
bearophile