when repr() fails

[Skaperen]

Your shell still has ascii as encoding.
You have posted different error about this before.

then i guess i didn't recognize them as the same

i did find the ascii() builtin function does what i wanted.  but ascii() does not exist in python2.  in python2 repr() does what i want, and in python3 repr() does not, while ascii() does. so i have to assume this be related, somehow, to the string concept changes between python2 and python3.  and, i guess i will have code that tests the python version (a module intended to work in both python2 and python3), maybe like this code that also removes the quotes:

foo = (repr(bar) if sys.version_info.major < 3 else ascii(bar))[1:-1]