Least-lossy string.encode to us-ascii?

[Tim Chase]

I've got a bunch of text in Portuguese and to transmit them, need to
have them in us-ascii (7-bit).  I'd like to keep as much information
as possible, just stripping accents, cedillas, tildes, etc.  So
"serviço móvil" becomes "servico movil".  Is there anything stock
that I've missed?  I can do mystring.encode('us-ascii', 'replace')
but that doesn't keep as much information as I'd hope.

-tkc