ensuring valid latin-1

[Chris Curvey]

Hey all,

I'm trying to write something that will "fail fast" if one of my users
gives me non-latin-1 characters.  So I tried this:

>>> testString = "\x80"
>>> foo = unicode(testString, "latin-1")
>>> foo
u'\x80'

I would have thought that that should have raised an error, because
\x80 is not a valid character in latin-1 (according to what I can
find).  Is this the expected behavior, or am I missing something?

I'm on Windows, but I have explicitly set the character set to be
latin-1 in sitecustomize.py

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'latin-1'