"Thus you lose data, but thats just dandy with me.": Please reconsider this attitude, before you perpetrate a nonsense or even a disaster.
Wrt your last para: 1. Roger didn't say "ignore" -- he said "won't accept" (a major difference). 2. The ASCII code comprises 128 characters, *NOT* 256. 3. What Roger means is: given a Python 8-bit string and no other information, you don't have a clue what the encoding is. Most codes of interest these days have the ASCII code (or a mild perversion thereof) in the first 128 positions, but it's anyones guess what the writer of the string had in mind with the next 128. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list