[Mailman-i18n] "Funny" characters in real names?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "MvL" =3D=3D Martin v L=F6wis <loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de> wr=
ites:

    >> BG> Again, I assume you mean ISO-8859-1 instead of ascii here.
    >> Same thing here.  We do name.encode('us-ascii') and catch any
    >> UnicodeError that might occur.

    MvL> That should be name.decode, or unicode(name,
    MvL> "us-ascii"). name.encode unfortunately works as well, but it
    MvL> first decodes using the system default encoding, then encodes
    MvL> using us-ascii - very close to what you want, but not the
    MvL> precise same thing.

Martin, sometimes this Unicode stuff makes my head hurt. ;)

I don't think I can use name.decode() because that's a Python 2.2-ism
and we need to stick to Python 2.1.

I don't think I can use unicode(name, 'us-ascii') because what if name
is already a Unicode string?  This'll give me a TypeError.

So it seems like name.encode('us-ascii') is my only choice.  What am I
missing?

-Barry