Walter Dörwald writes:
"surrogatepass" (for the "don't complain about lone half surrogates" handler) and "surrogatereplace" sound OK to me. However the other "...replace" handlers are destructive (i.e. when such a "...replace" handler is used for encoding, decoding will not produce the original unicode string).
That doesn't bother me in the slightest. "Replace" does not connote "destructive" or "non-destructive" to me; it connotes "substitution". The fact that other error handlers happen to be destructive doesn't affect that at all for me. YMMV.
The purpose of the PEP 383 error handler however is to be roundtrip safe, so maybe we should choose a slightly different name? How about "surrogateescape"?
To me, "escape" has a strong connotation of a multicharacter representation of a single character, and that's not true here. How about "surrogatetranslate"? I still prefer "surrogatereplace", as it's slightly easier for me to type.