windows-1252 is based on iso-8859-1. Thus, I'd like to be able to chain coders as follows: bytes.decode("windows-1252-ext", else=lambda r: r.decode("iso-8859-1")) What this "else" does is that it's a lambda, and it gets passed an object with a decode method identical to the bytes decode method, except that it doesn't affect already-decoded characters. In this case, "windows-1252-ext" only includes things in the \x80-\x9F range, leaving it up to "iso-8859-1" to handle the rest. A similar process would happen for encoding: encode with "windows-1252-ext", else = "iso-8859-1". (Technically, "windows-1252-ext" isn't needed - you can use the existing "windows-1252" and combine it with the "iso-8859-1" to get "windows-1252-c1".) This would be a novel way to think of encodings as not just flat translation tables but highly composable translation tables. I have a thing for composition.