Unicode/UTF-8 confusion

[Tom Stambaugh]

I'm still confused about this, even after days of hacking at it. It's time I 
asked for help. I understand that each of you knows more about Python, 
Javascript, unicode, and programming than me, and I understand that each of 
you has a higher SAT score than me. So please try and be gentle with your 
responses.

I use simplejson to serialize html strings that the server is delivering to 
a browser. Since the apostrophe is a string terminator in javascript, I need 
to escape any apostrophe embedded in the html.

Just to be clear, the specific unicode character I'm struggling with is 
described in Python as:
u'\N{APOSTROPHE}'}. It has a standardized utf-8 value (according to, for 
example, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0027/index.htm) of 
0x27.

This can be expressed in several common ways:
hex: 0x27
Python literal: u"\u0027"

Suppose I start with some test string that contains an embedded 
apostrophe -- for example: u"   '   ". I believe that the appropriate json 
serialization of this is (presented as a list to eliminate notation 
ambiguities):

['"', ' ', ' ', ' ', '\\', '\\', '0', '0', '2', '7', ' ', ' ', ' ', '"']

This is a 14-character utf-8 serialization of the above test string.

I know I can brute-force this, using something like the following:
def encode(aRawString):
    aReplacement = ''.join(['\\', '0', '0', '2', '7'])
    aCookedString = aRawString.replace("'", aReplacement)
    answer = simplejson.dumps(aCookedString)
    return answer

I can't even make mailers let me *TYPE* a string literal for the replacement 
string without trying to turn it into an HTML link!

Anyway, I know that my "encode" function works, but it pains me to add that 
"replace" call before *EVERY* invocation of the simplejson.dumps() method. 
The reason I upgraded to 1.7.4 was to get the c-level speedup routine now 
offered by simplejson -- yet the need to do this apostrophe escaping seems 
to negate this advantage! Is there perhaps some combination of dumps keyword 
arguments, python encode()/str() magic, or something similar that 
accomplishes this same result?

What is the highest-performance way to get simplejson to emit the desired 
serialization of the given test string?